How Mireya Found Me

Mireya was not planned. She arrived in a sentence I wrote almost by accident — something about a woman standing at the edge of a cliff with a lantern, looking down at the valley she had always known — and then refused to leave.

I did not know who she was for a long time. I knew the image: the lantern, the valley below, the wind coming off the edge with the smell of something unnamed. I knew the tension — the pull backward toward the familiar and the pull forward toward whatever was out there. I did not know her name, her history, what she was running from or toward.

What I discovered as I wrote her is that she was not running from anything. She was running toward something she could not name yet — and the inability to name it was the whole problem. The valley had given her language for everything: the bread, the seasons, the expectations of people who loved her. It had not given her language for the thing at the cliff’s edge.

I think many women know that feeling. The life is not bad. It may even be good. But there is something at the edge that the current life has no word for — and the absence of a word makes it very easy to dismiss.

Writing Mireya was, in part, an attempt to find words for that thing. I do not know if I fully succeeded. But I know that the women who have written to me about The Lantern in the Valley recognise her immediately — and that recognition feels like the most important kind of success a novel can have.

The image that started everything

The image of a woman with a lantern at the edge of a valley stayed with me for months before I wrote a single word of the novel. I did not try to force it into a plot. I let it sit. I asked myself what kind of woman would stand there, what kind of valley she was looking at, what time of day it was, what she was wearing, what she could smell. The answers came slowly, and they came from the image itself rather than from any plan I had imposed on it.

This is the method I trust most in my writing process. I do not start with plot. I start with an image that carries more weight than I can explain, and I follow it until it reveals its meaning. The plot emerges from the image, not the other way around. Mireya’s story — her family, her valley, her choices — all grew from that single moment of a woman holding light at the edge of darkness.

The lantern itself became a symbol I did not plan. It is not magic. It is practical — a real lantern, held by a real woman, burning real oil. But it is also the thing she carries when she steps beyond the known world. Every character in my fiction carries something, even if it is not a physical object. In The House That Kept Secrets, Clara carries a hidden room. Mireya carries a lantern. The objects are different, but the weight is the same.

Writing a character who knows more than I do

Mireya taught me something I did not expect. She knew her own story before I did. There were moments in the writing where I would type a sentence and realise, as the words appeared, that I was discovering something Mireya had always known about herself. The best writing feels like that — not like invention, but like recognition.

I think this is what people mean when they say a character takes on a life of their own. It is not mystical. It is the result of deep enough knowledge. When you have spent enough time with a character in your imagination, you stop deciding what they would do and start knowing it. Mireya reached that point for me about a third of the way into the first draft, and from then on I was not writing her story. I was following it.

For anyone writing their first novel, especially later in life, this is the thing to trust. The character will tell you who they are if you give them enough space. I wrote about this in writing your first novel after 40 — the process of learning to trust the story rather than control it. Mireya was my teacher in that lesson.

What Mireya taught me about South African women’s stories

Mireya is a South African woman, and her story is rooted in a specific place and time. But the thing she is reaching for — the unnamed thing at the edge of her known world — is not uniquely South African. It is universal. That is the paradox of writing specific fiction. The more rooted a story is in a particular place, the more it travels.

The women who have written to me about Mireya are from different countries, different ages, different circumstances. But they all recognised her. They all knew the feeling of standing at an edge with a lantern, not knowing what was ahead but knowing they could not go back. That is what fiction can do. It gives language to the thing we could not name, and in doing so, it makes the unnamed thing real enough to act on.

Find The Lantern in the Valley at Reader’s Shack — published by Hayshack Press.