How Cornwall ended up in Bournemouth by Ros Bayes

Last week I took my characters to Bournemouth. They’d been languishing inside my computer ever since I gave birth to them in Wales last year. I came back from Wales with eighteen chapters written. And in fairness to myself, I hadn’t abandoned them entirely, I have taken them out from time to time to edit and polish them a bit. But I decided it was really time to make them get a move on, so knowing that I would be distracted at home by all the things needing to be done, I decided to take them to Bournemouth for the week and see what they would do. 

I was quite pleased with the result – I came home with a further six chapters written. But it turned out I hadn’t actually taken my characters to Bournemouth; they had taken me to Cornwall. At one point I walked back to my room wondering why all the pictures on the wall were of Hampshire and Dorset, when I was in Cornwall. And then I remembered, I'm not in Cornwall, I'm in Dorset. But that morning my characters had driven out to the coast road from Camborne and had a conversation on the road overlooking Godrevy Lighthouse. I may have been in Dorset, but it seems my head was in Cornwall. 

At times they surprised me, too. I thought the young lady at the centre of the story had been friendless in the place where she had been living. It turned out she had made one friend there, and she pointed out to me how she’d had the opportunity to form a friendship, something I hadn’t previously thought of. Her mother surprised me, too, by turning up in the company Mercedes just when I was thinking that it would be a good idea to bring her in at this point. Several evenings I went to bed not sure where the story was going next, and woke up knowing exactly how it was going to unfold, at least for the next two or three chapters. 

Imagination is a wonderful thing, isn’t it? God is the fountain of all imagination, and I’m convinced that our ability to imagine and create is a large part of what it means to be made in His image. In George Bernard Shaw’s Joan of Arc, when St Joan is faced with the accusation that the voices she hears come not from God but from her imagination, she replies, “Of course. That is how the messages of God come to us.” 

So may the messages of God fill your imagination and spill out into your writing.