How Abandoned Places Inspired My Novel | Writing, Ruins & the Stories Hidden in Forgotten Places
- adgrafics
- Jul 6
- 2 min read
There are books that are carefully planned.
And there are books that seem to find you.
"Vivant, Ailleurs" belongs to the second category.
A few years ago, I spent six months living in my van, travelling across Italy.
Officially, I was searching for abandoned villas, forgotten monasteries
and neglected estates, imagining how they could one day become extraordinary places again through landscape design, storytelling and place branding.
I would spend my days exploring old buildings,
many of them inspired by locations like those documented
Some were silent.
Some felt asleep.
Others seemed to breathe.
Whenever I found one that was accessible, I would often stay nearby until the evening.
As daylight disappeared and the silence settled in, I had the strange feeling that these places still carried something.
Not ghosts.
Not mystery.
But memory.
As if every abandoned room had quietly kept the echoes of the people who had once laughed there, played music, fallen in love, argued, dreamed.
Sometimes I imagined hearing a melody that no longer existed.
A forgotten piece of music waiting for someone to listen again.
Those moments stayed with me.
Then I would get back into my van.
Drive for hours through the Italian countryside.
Thinking about gardens.
Thinking about ruined estates.
Thinking about the concepts I could one day create for these forgotten places.
And somewhere between one landscape and the next...
Vivant Ailleurs began writing itself.
In Italian, there is a wonderful word: tarlo.
Literally, it is a woodworm.
Figuratively, it describes an idea that quietly keeps
drilling into your mind until you can no longer ignore it.
That is exactly how this story arrived.
It didn't feel like I invented it.
It felt as though it had been patiently waiting for me.
I have always loved writing.
Yet I often felt like an impostor whenever I imagined writing a novel.
Who was I to tell a story?
And perhaps that is why I love Vivant Ailleurs so much.
Not because I believe it is perfect.
It certainly isn't.
But every time I read it again, I am transported back to that journey.
Back to sleeping in my van.
Back to the abandoned villas.
Back to the gardens I had not yet designed.
Back to the feeling that sometimes stories are not created.
Sometimes they are simply whispered to us.
If you would like to discover the journey that accompanied mine,
Vivant Ailleurs is available here in french:
Comments