The Confidence to Make It Up

Now I've started this, I realise one of the things it means is more writing. So maybe that wasn't such a good idea. Will I really want to add to this after a day of writing the play? Not that I'm planning to be doing that while we're in Brazil - although I haven't investigated how I'm actually going to add anything to this while we're away...

Is the research trip really necessary anyway? After all, in an interview on BookSense.com Eva Ibbotson says what she did to write the book:

'I read books, looked at pictures, watched films and videos of wildlife, talked to travelers, and tried to learn some Portuguese. There was a lot of historical research to do on the rubber boom, which brought the settlers to the Amazon at the turn of the century.

I think being married to a naturalist (who kept an ant nest under the bed when I first met him) was more important than my own physiology background -- physiology is more about the insides of animals, not their habitat and habits. Usually I go to the places I write about, but Manaus has changed so much that I decided to keep it in my head.'

If Eva Ibbotson didn't need to go to the Amazon, why do I? Partly I think because her imagination is directly present in the book. As an adaptor, the risk is that because what I'm writing is at one further remove, the world of the play won't be sufficiently rich. It's also a way to bring the rest of the team closer to the place in which most of the play is set. Hence this blog.

What novelist Jim Crace said in The Guardian about researching his novel Quarantine also rang true:

'I only spent a couple of nights in the Judean desert, and those were only to give me the confidence to make it up.'