About Writing "The Sonne in Hir Splendoure" - James Prescott

About Writing "The Sonne in Hir Splendoure"

Copyright © 1996 James Prescott

I had been requested: "[X] asked me, on her behalf, to ask you to consider writing another story, the same length, for the sake of the man in the story, and for your own sake, and mine, telling of the man waking up, discovering himself beached on the shore of a land with apple trees and finding his way to the summer country."

[ To see the earlier story check "The Allegory of Despair". ]

I replied: "The only reason this is hard is that C.S. Lewis' The Last Battle from the Narnia series must inevitably creep into the fringes of one's consciousness. For all that it is dripping with mystical Christianity, it does rather cover the territory."

When I started writing, I had no clue as to where it would end up.

The last line (the name of the inn) really came last, and was a very pleasing inspiration to tie what I had written to what [X] had requested.

I didn't know about the inn until he was watching the collection of cottages from the wood, and even then I didn't know where the inn was. I didn't know he would avoid the cottages until he stopped at the edge of the wood to look at them. I didn't know about the landlady until he entered the inn.

I didn't know about the bar and the stream until the paragraph before, and the jetty only showed up after he had been tumbled over the bar into the stream mouth, and had his ribs broken. The stream is in England, though the story didn't identify it.

You noticed he had to go back for the silver coins? The jars of grain under the hearthstone didn't occur until he was about to leave for his next (unknown) destination, and the coins only showed up after he found the jars empty.

Almost every other element of the story developed only a few words, or a sentence, or at most a paragraph earlier.

I had "the summer country" in mind from the start, but as the story progressed it turned out he couldn't leave reality behind. I thought several times about veering off into a "less real" direction, but he wouldn't let me. He wanted his broken arm set, and he wanted hot food (though I didn't know about the hot food until he was on the way along the track to the inn).

[ You can go back to the story here. ]