Imagination grants access to a place the writer has never visited

Evidence

In my dreams of Europe, I had found the keys to the gate of an unknown city. For the constant and passionate imagination, no documents or passes are needed. It did not seem to me that I was writing of dead people or events that were distant and frozen. I was working at a transformative moment in the history of Europe. … By writing a novel one performs a revolutionary act. A novel is an act of hope. It allows us to imagine that things may be other than they are. — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 988

Categorization

• SEED: Essay angle: how research-free imaginative immersion can authenticate place-based fiction more than travel.
• XREF: Connects to her chapter on The Giant O’Brien where a physical artifact led her back to Ireland by a different route. — connects to: A writer may revisit a place because she cannot quite believe it exists. — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 193; A writer’s silence on the page is not silence in the mind — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 463; The imagination is a safe place where the dead can appear — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 1016 (+3 more)
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 988

Broader Connections

• A writer can render un-witnessed events with sensuous precision #corroborates (0.80) — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 563
• The imagination is a safe place where the dead can appear #expands (0.60) — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 1016
• Writing can release grief the writer did not know existed. #expands (0.55) — Karl Ove Knausgaard, A Death in the Family, 2513
• A writer’s silence on the page is not silence in the mind #expands (0.50) — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 463