I’m about to walk through the set of my own book
Back in the city where Spirit Elfen lives
Spirit Elfen is set in Heidelberg. I’ve been proofreading it for months. This week I’m flying back to Germany to see my mom, and Heidelberg keeps living in two places at once: on the page, where I’m trying to finish it, and under my feet, where I haven’t been in a while.
I was born in Germany and I left. That’s the shortest version of the story. The longer version includes Ireland, a husband called Ian, a career I didn’t expect, and a stack of books I didn’t know I’d write. Germany is the country I learned to read in. Ireland is the country I learned to write in.
When I sit down to draft a scene set in Heidelberg, two images of the place press against each other on the page. One is the real city, which is under the prose. The other is the one my imagination has been keeping.
Ever read Krabat? If you haven’t, you should!
The Krabat legend is what got me into Spirit Elfen in the first place. If you’ve never heard of it, and most non-German readers haven’t, it’s a dark Sorbian folk tale about a young orphan who apprentices himself to a mill that’s run by a sorcerer, and the other mill-workers are all trapped under spells, and once a year one of them dies. It reads like a horror story and it’s taught to kids. German folklore is like that. It doesn’t soften anything.
I wove pieces of Krabat into Spirit Elfen without realising I was doing it. The shape of the story, anyway. The bound apprentice, the mill as a closed world, the price someone has to pay at the turn of the year. Adi doesn’t walk into a mill. But she walks into something very like one.
I also spent about three months down a research rabbit hole on the Codex Manesse, which is a 14th-century illuminated manuscript of Middle High German love songs, half of which live in Heidelberg at the University Library. I wanted one specific image from it, a page that has a man kneeling to a woman whose face you can’t see. I wanted it for a scene. I didn’t end up using the scene, but the Codex stayed. It’s on a character’s wall in chapter nineteen.
What happens to an author’s research?
Most of the research never makes the page. It’s the part of writing historical-folkloric fiction I wasn’t warned about. You end up reading about Sorbian linguistics and the Heidenloch tunnel and the 1622 siege, and then you put 80% of it in a drawer, because the book doesn’t need it. The book only needs the feeling that the drawer exists. Readers can tell when a setting has been researched and when it’s been faked. I don’t know how they can tell. But they can.
So this week, while I’m in Germany, I’m going to walk around a bit. The book is long past the drafting phase and deep into the final edit. I’m walking because I haven’t been in Heidelberg in a while, and because there’s something grounding about standing on the actual streets while I put the last layer of polish on a version of them.
I’ll take my mom out for a walk if the weather holds. She doesn’t read my books, but she asks how the book is going every time I visit, with the polite tone of someone who’s still waiting to see if the career is real. I always tell her it’s almost done. This time, for once, it’s true.
Spirit Elfen is what it is now. I know walking around Heidelberg will change what’s on the page. But when the book comes out next month, there’s going to be a version of me inside it that’s standing in a specific spot near the castle, looking down at the Neckar, thinking about Adi. That version of me will have been there this week. I’ll know the difference even if no reader will.
Want more of this? I send a weekly letter with the stuff I don’t post publicly — deleted scenes, character asides, the occasional emotional wreckage. You can join the inner circle here and I’ll throw in a free copy of Spirit Hunger on the way in.
xo Ella
Originally published on Writing Through the Veil