Writing A Season in the Sun: When Fiction Begins with Real Life

There is something rather wonderful about reaching the end of writing a novel and looking back at where it all came from. With A Season in the Sun, perhaps more than anything else I have written, I find myself thinking about the strange relationship between memory and imagination, and how experiences from decades ago can remain somewhere inside us until, one day, they find their way onto the page.

A Season in the Sun is a novel, but there is a great deal of reality running through its heart.

The story takes us back to the Costa Brava in the 1980s, to a very different world of overseas travel. This was long before mobile phones, social media, Google Maps and the ability to instantly contact somebody thousands of miles away. Travelling abroad felt like genuinely going somewhere. You stepped onto a coach or aeroplane in Britain and entered another world, sometimes for months at a time.

I know that world because I lived parts of it.

My own experiences in travel, Spain and overseas life have inevitably found their way into the story. I have taken moments I remember, places I knew, personalities I encountered and situations I experienced and allowed fiction to grow around them. Sometimes a tiny memory from many years ago can become the seed of an entire scene. A conversation, a bar, a journey, a particular evening or simply the way Mediterranean air felt after the heat of the day can suddenly return with remarkable clarity.

The characters work in much the same way.

They are fictional characters within a fictional story, but many have elements inspired by real people I have known. A mannerism might come from one person, a sense of humour from another and a particular outlook on life from somebody I met only briefly. Occasionally a character develops almost entirely from the memory of someone who made an impression upon me many years ago.

That is one of the great privileges of being a novelist. You can take fragments of reality and reshape them into something new.

Thomas, the central character, experiences the excitement and uncertainty of discovering another country while simultaneously discovering himself. He arrives in Spain believing that the summer is simply an adventure before the next expected stage of his life. Instead, the Costa Brava begins changing the way he sees everything: work, friendship, love, responsibility and, ultimately, his own future.

That emotional journey is enormously important to me because travel has repeatedly done exactly that throughout my own life.

The places we visit can change us.

Sometimes profoundly.

Spain certainly changed me. I lived and worked there during an important period of my younger life, and those experiences never really disappeared. The sounds, smells, friendships, characters and atmosphere remained somewhere in my memory. Writing A Season in the Sun gave me the extraordinary opportunity to return to some of those feelings and explore them through fiction.

I wanted the Costa Brava itself to become almost another character in the novel. I wanted readers to feel the Mediterranean heat, hear conversations drifting from cafés, walk through the old streets of Lloret de Mar and understand the peculiar rhythm of a resort town during a long summer season. Most importantly, I wanted to capture the emotional experience of being young and abroad at a time when the world felt considerably larger than it does today.

There is nostalgia in the book, certainly, but I never wanted nostalgia to become fantasy. Overseas life was exciting, but it was also hard work. Guests had problems. Coaches broke down. Suitcases disappeared. People became ill. Relationships became complicated. Friendships were tested. The sunshine did not magically remove the realities of life.

That mixture of beauty and difficulty is what makes the memories real.

Perhaps that is also why writing this novel has been such an enjoyable and surprisingly emotional experience. At times I have found myself smiling while writing because I recognise something beneath the fiction. I know the feeling. I remember the atmosphere. Somewhere, beneath the characters and the storyline, there is a younger version of me remembering what it felt like to discover that the world was much bigger and more exciting than I had previously imagined.

Readers will never necessarily know which moments came from experience, which characters contain fragments of real people and which scenes emerged entirely from imagination.

I rather like that.

Because ultimately A Season in the Sun is not intended to be a record of what happened. It is a novel about what those extraordinary years felt like.

And sometimes fiction allows us to tell that truth better than facts ever could.