For the first time in over a year, I am back in Barcelona in the apartment where I wrote A Sketch in Time and where I imagined that Micah, Jamie and Celia lived. I have visited this apartment many times over many years, but it has a new dimension for me now. As I move around this space, I bump into my own memories of past visits but also into the made-up things that happened here. In a funny and wonderful way, both are equally real.
I have also found that some real objects that I borrowed from reality and plopped into my fictional world are different from how I remembered them. There is a desk that plays a central role in the book, and I based the desk on a real desk, one just next to me as I write now. However, in my imagination and in the novel, the desk grew larger. It became more polished and elaborate. The color of the wood changed from a dark chocolate brown to a lighter brown with hints of red. I didn’t make these changes on purpose, and when I found myself face to face with the real desk, I was surprised to find that it is different from the desk in my book.
I have not had the chance to visit Sils, the place at the heart of the novel, and I wonder how it will be different from how I wrote it. The Sils in the novel is rooted in the real, but it is infused with layers of experience that exist only in my novel, and so I suspect that I would find it, like the desk, to be a shadow of the Sils I have now in my imagination and that I set down on the page. Yet, the two Sils will co-exist, each adding depth to the other.
What I have discovered, being here in Catalunya, is that not only does the real lie at the foundation of the fictional, but the fictional reflects back onto the real, casting light and shadows and making something magical that hovers on a border between two worlds, both of them real.