When I received the email asking if I would like to write a story inspired by the work of Cervantes, my first idea was set in his birthplace, Alcalá de Henares, where I had been the previous year. The story focused on a relationship and the theatre in Alcalá, one of the oldest in Spain. I wrote around 3,000 words but the story wasn’t quite alive. It was all right, but it didn’t excite me, and so I threw it away. I turned to his short novels, the novelas ejemplares, and found El Licenciado Vidriera the story of the lawyer who believed he was made of glass. I knew as soon as I read it that I wanted to re-imagine it. I wanted to feel again what it is to be on the turn of adolescence, to go from having an invisible body, to having one which is publicly scrutinised.
I wrote my story Glass quickly as though in a fever. I had been very ill the previous year, and had procedures to examine the inside of my body: I lay on scanning machines and saw images of my pelvis, of my lungs, of my beating heart. The powerlessness I felt at being told where to lie, when to undress, was driven into the narrative of the young girl. I finished, rewrote it, rewrote it again. And when I submitted it, I acknowledged the fact that if I hadn’t been asked to respond to Cervantes’ work, the story would not exist.
But that was not the end.
Two weeks after I sent the story, I was re-reading my writing journal. It is where I put ideas, thoughts about writing, and any writing quotes I want to remember. I flipped back through the pages, back through time to old thoughts, old ideas. And there, on the left hand page, dated four years previously, I had written: Write a story about a girl who thinks she is made of glass.
I stared at my own handwriting. I had already had the idea. But I had no memory of writing these words and had no memory of having the idea. I had definitely never read El Licenciado Vidriera before.
But that was not the end.
The following week, I was tidying up the notes I keep on my smartphone. Random thoughts, ideas. And there, two years ago, I had written: Write about a girl made of glass.
The idea had been inside me, had attempted to burst out at least two times. There was an inevitability that I would eventually write it. And when I was invited to take part in the project, it meant my idea that I had had all along, took form and became real.
It felt at the time of sending off the story that I had completed a task which I had been set, but in fact more than that, it was one more thing I could tick off the list of ideas that comes solely from my imagination, from my subconscious mind, which moves in odd, slow, underwater ways.
