In the heart of the Picos de Europa, between medieval churches, ancient legends, and isolated villages, the body of an artist appears. The resemblance to a death that occurred months earlier raises fears that a serial killer is at work in the area.
In this making-of, Carmen Macedo explains how she wrote The Bear of Ándara (NdeNovela).
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If there is anything I can answer with certainty about the creation process of The Bear of Ándara, it is when the true seed of the novel emerged. For any other question, even about key aspects of the setting, of the characters themselves, or of the very structure of the work, I might respond with some inconsistency or even with ambiguities, because very few of the numerous decisions made by an author stem from a single motive. And because, in the end, once the project is finished, the work has already swallowed the process to the point of dissolving it even in the memory of the person who created it. But on the question of when, there is no doubt: it happened on a trip to Liébana in April 2024, while leaving behind Seville, which was buzzing at the Feria under the warmth of a spring warmer than normal, to the surprise of no one. Naturally, the prior groundwork was done, the first ideas were more or less clear, and the documentation process advanced. I was still in that phase as perturbing as it is essential, which we can call “thinking the novel.”
That trip to the Liébana valley and to the Picos de Europa did not reveal places I did not already know, for the most part, but did present spots I could look at with fresh eyes; eyes of someone who intends to take others along. And for me, crime fiction has always been a literature of travel, and that is what I strive for: to write novels that make the reader move, want to know, desire to return, and travel through the pages of the book.
From those days in Cantabria, I keep in the computer archives a folder with photographs and videos I took as material for inspiration: medieval churches, facades, postcard-worthy villages, dozens of mountain shots, exquisite dishes, clouds, trees, explanatory signs, parterres with colorful flowers. And among them, leaning against a stone wall, the image of a street sign indicating a dead end beneath another sign with the warning: “GPS erroneous. Turn back!” Fortunately, I have long internalized that the most advisable way to discover certain places, beyond books, is to do it by one’s own means: walking or cycling. “There must be many who reach this place by car, misled by the navigator, for there to be such a sign,” I understood then.
Throughout the writing process of The Bear of Ándara, I kept returning again and again to that folder of inspiration and I came across the photo of the plaque, which struck me as a metaphor for writing itself. Isn’t this a constant coming and going? Isn’t it about realizing that this is not the right path more often than we would like until, one day, magically, everything finally flows?
The writing process of The Bear of Ándara, perhaps due to the very demand of the plot, responds to what is usually called “mapping the writing”; that is, one first creates an outline in which the structure of the work is laid out and the most notable events that will occur in each chapter are mapped, as well as the turning points and, in the case of a crime novel, the clues. Naturally, the author tends to be unfaithful to their own outline. In these days when the novel is landing in bookstores I realize, in fact, how little I followed it, while at the same time acknowledging the crucial role it played, especially in moments of doubt.
And these publication days are always a time for reflection in which it is inevitable to relate every stimulus to the work itself. I am now precisely reading an essay on writing and the craft of writing by Annie Dillard titled The Life of Writing. Dillard asserts, and urges the author: “The process is nothing; erase the traces. The road is not the work.” I think about the writing process of The Bear of Ándara as I read it—an undertaking that has also required extensive documentation, since the novel engages diverse realities: Cantabrian mythology, Romanesque art, and medieval symbolism, alongside scientific rigor; incorporating elements of investigation and criminal profiling into the plot. And I hope all these layers are transparent on the pages of the book. May this necessary journey I describe here serve the important purpose: the story, which now belongs to the readers.
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Author: Carmen Macedo. Title: The Bear of Ándara. Publisher: NdeNovela. Sales: All Your Books.