Imagining a land

This month marks two years since my first little fantasy novel,The Cliff Runner, was published by Blake Education (www.blake.com.au). It was a new genre for me. I have other ideas for fantasy novels—more elaborate, more adventurous—which I’d love to get my teeth into soon. But The Cliff Runner was a start, in which I imagined and built a land and set a story in it.

It began with a made-up map. But it was a map that intersected with the real world. You see, I wanted a landscape that was at least a bit like the coastal area in which I lived. That’s because I wanted to get out along the real coast for inspiration, where the cliffs rose and the waves crashed upon the rocks. The real coast was to be the beginning—though only the beginning—of my made-up land. So, when I began on that first day to sketch out a map of my fantasy land, it was a map with a long eastern coastline that ran right down the page, like my own known bit of coastline in eastern Australia. In fact, I made that first sketch overlooking the real coast, with the crash of waves sounding in my ears.

This, as a writer of fantasy, was my compromise with reality. It helped me stick to that old rule-of-thumb of writers that you should “write what you know.” But then—and here’s the important point—I stretched it all into fantasy. I made the cliffs higher and the surf more treacherous than the coast I knew. I added things too—new bays, headlands and mountains. The most dramatic of these was Mount Targ, an active volcano. In the novel, Mount Targ would often colour the night sky with a ghostly orange glow, and sometimes fresh lava would burst down its slopes to crash, boiling, into the sea. I knew nothing first-hand of volcanoes, but I knew enough in general terms to add it (without giving much detail) to the landscape I did know. Beyond Mount Targ, to the north, I created the Bay of Thularn, strewn with boulders; its treacherous waters had been the graveyard for many vessels. To me, it was reminiscent of a real bay that I had visited, where I had seen rusting wreckage on the rocks from a hundred-year old steamship called the S.S. Maitland.

I created a little fishing village too called Leoden. That’s where the main character of The Cliff Runner was to be based, for Arun was an apprentice runner. He was tasked—in thismedieval-style world—with running vital messages along the otherwise inaccessible coastline. That’s what would lead to his adventures; for the day would come when the sails of enemy ships would be sighted across the sea, and a message would have to be raced along the cliffs to the military commanders.

At least one more detail is worth mentioning. High above the real cliffs of my own world, I would sometimes sight a White-Bellied Sea-Eagle (Haliaeetus leucogaster). This is Australia’s second largest bird of prey, just slightly smaller than the famous Wedge-tailed Eagle of the outback. The Sea-Eagle is an impressive bird. With a wingspan that can measure more than two metres, it glides swiftly on the heights above the cliffs, a master of the air currents. It is also a formidable predator, with knife-sharp talons and beak. I can’t remember now if it was this bird that specifically gave me the idea of the deadly flocks of korakim in my novel. But I knew, when I created the korakim, that they somehow fit the landscape, just like Sea-Eagles did along the real coast. But then I stretched my made-up birds into fantasy, just as I had stretched into fantasy my landscape: the korakim were to be trained by the enemy invaders to attack runners—like my main character!—on the cliffs. That’s why my main character had to become an expert fighter as well as a runner. There would be big battleson the cliffs before the novel reached its end!

Of course, there’s much more that I could say about my writing of The Cliff Runner novel. I haven’t said anything much yet of my characters, or of my made-up back-story, or of my writing style, or of plot development. But the main point I’ve been trying to make is that the story itself grew out of the land I imagined. And the land I imagined was inspired by a landscape I had already often walked in.