On writing a town that does not quite exist

Cresthollow Bay does not exist. There is no harbour, no high street, no public library with a Returns trolley near the front door. There is no Iris, no Otto, no constable Suggs, and no herring gull called Gerald.

This is, I think, a perfectly conventional thing to say about a fictional place, but I find it more interesting than I expected to. When I started writing the first Cresthollow Bay novel I had a different town in mind — a real one, on the south Devon coast, where I had spent two long damp Octobers in my twenties. By the third chapter, the real town had become inconvenient. The streets ran in the wrong directions. The library was in the wrong spot. The harbour, irritatingly, did not face north. So I quietly rebuilt it from scratch, and the rebuilt version had the small advantage of being entirely mine.

The thing nobody tells you about inventing a town is that the work is mostly subtractive. You begin with too much — every coastal village you have ever visited, every bookshop with a bell on the door, every pub with a chalkboard advertising a pie of dubious provenance — and the writing is the long, patient business of removing what does not belong. Cresthollow Bay has its high street and its Anchor and its archive. It does not have a chip shop, because I tried one and it kept dragging the scenes toward the harbour when I needed them at the library. It does not have a tourist information centre, because nobody in the books would set foot in one. The map is small because the story is small. That is, in part, the point.

What it does have, and what I cannot quite explain, is a quality I will call known-ness. I know which way the wind comes off the sea. I know that the bakery on Harbour Street opens at seven. I know that the library’s Tuesday reading group meets at two and that Otto Calloway will, at some point, make an objection to the chosen book. None of these things are real. All of them are settled.

This first dispatch is not really about that. It is, mostly, an excuse to put something on the page so that the page exists. Future dispatches will be a mix: notes from inside the world of Cresthollow Bay (regional history, library policy, the precise geography of the high street), occasional behind-the-scenes pieces about writing the books, and the odd digression about whatever I happen to be reading.

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— V.