The well notebooks: where a novel comes from

The novel came out of a newspaper clipping from 2019: a village well had run dry, the villagers claimed the water had been drawn off to a factory, a case had been opened. I cut the clipping out, pasted it into a notebook, and there it stayed for three years.

Then I visited four villages. None of them is the village in the novel; the village in the novel is the sum of the four. The sentence that repeats most often in my notebook is this: nobody talks about the water first. First comes the road, then the school, then migration. Water arrives in the forty-fifth minute of the conversation, and when it arrives the table goes quiet.

There are also the drilling reports. A dry language: depth, flow rate, conductivity. While writing the most emotional scene in the book I had a drilling report in front of me; without the coldness of measurement that scene would have been too wet.

Under the clipping there is a note in my own hand: what stays where the water withdraws? The novel spent three years looking for the answer. What it found is this: a trace stays, and people who don't look at each other.