reality

I see stories everywhere. A lot of the time I love it. I am never bored alone in a public place because I make up stories about the strangers around me - perhaps a table of old men are talking in Italian accents; I think up a whole history of how they ended up across the sea - perhaps a sharp-looking businesswoman sits nearby; I imagine wishes for her. These strangers never know that I have created double lives for them.

And I see stories in imagination. Characters emerge and push through doors and walk past windows, giving me glimpses of something. And I write to grasp just a bit of the Something. As long as I can remember, there have been stories, characters, images, sounds, and I have felt such an irresistible, tantalizing pull to recreate them, to give them lives outside of my own mind, to bring them into the rest of the world.

I see things that are not there - or are. I actually take it as an insult when people call fictional characters "not real" - I think they are real - just maybe not real in the same way I am real. I can't grasp the thought of Lizzie Bennet or Jane Eyre or Mr Pickwick or Cassandra Mortmain or Hester Prynne or Anne Shirley not being real at all.

And places - Narnia, Middle Earth - I don't believe that they are "not real" either. They are real - in a different way. Writing fiction is not about inventing things from nowhere, but rather concerns delving into different shades and layers of reality.

So I don't really think there is such a thing as seeing things that are not there. They are there. To me, statements like "fairies are not real" or "dragons are fake" or even "Pemberley is not a real place" are in a way arrogant. Who are we to say what is "real" and what is "not real"? We do not make the rules. All we can do is say, Who knows?, and thrill to the mystery.