A research trip and baby turtles

I just got home from a research trip to Turkey. I was at a little town I’ve visited three or four times before, but always with my holiday head on. This was my first trip there with my writing head on. I’ve used the town as a starting point for the setting of my current writing project, and there were a few places I’d written about that didn’t feel fully realised enough, so I wanted to go back and fill in some mental gaps.

What was surprising was that when I revisited places I’d been to before and had written about, many of them were very different. Rooms had different layouts, geographical features were in different places, the atmosphere of certain places was different.

In all, I’ve spent about six weeks of real time in this town in Turkey, and 18 months of mental time there as I’ve been writing about it. While I’ve deliberately redesigned parts of the town to fit the needs of the story, there were lots of things I’d swear I’d written about faithfully. From seeing my characters interacting in these spaces for so long, my visual image of them was solid. So it was an uncanny experience to wander around the real place and find it warped in so many ways.

While my hope for the trip was that I’d come back with patches for all of the sketchily realised places in my book, I’m now simultaneously carrying two different sets of mental locations – the pre-trip one, and the post-trip one. Now that I’m back and resuming work on the book, I’m not sure I can just copy and paste the actions of my characters into these newly researched spaces. Reconciling the two is going to be tricky.

It’s an odd feeling.

One of the most extreme differences between real and remembered locations was a turtle rescue centre. It plays a big part in the story, and my visual memory of the place was rock-solid. But when I got there, I found it to be twice the size and in a different place.

For this particular location, I think I have to stick with my warped-memory version, rather than the refreshed-memory version as the actual place is too big and modern, too full of people to fit the events that happen there in my story. But there are lots of little details that I’ll work in – specific (and heartbreaking) turtle injuries I saw there, and especially these gorgeous baby turtles.

They’d only hatched the night before, and after getting into difficulties had been rescued from the beach and held for a day at the rescue centre. That night, they would be released back into the sea.

When I saw them, I got a feeling in my tummy like I had one swimming around inside.