Daily Inspiration Quote by Rose Tremain

For a novelist, “research” isn’t a fact-gathering chore; it’s a kind of negotiated possession. Rose Tremain’s line makes that claim quietly radical: any place, any era, any social world can become “immediate” if the writer stays with it long enough. The keyword is “slowly.” She rejects the fantasy of instant authenticity, the tourist version of historical detail where a few textures and dates stand in for lived experience. Vividness, in her framing, is earned through duration, repetition, and attention until the invented environment starts to press on the senses the way the writer’s apartment, street, or weather does.

There’s subtext here about authority, too. Tremain is implicitly defending the novelist’s right to roam: you don’t have to be born into a setting to render it; you have to submit to it. “Potentially” is doing honest work, acknowledging the risk of failure and the ethical stakes of getting it wrong. Not every setting will yield; not every writer will listen well enough.

The final comparison - “as immediate to me as my own real surroundings” - is a small dare to the reader who treats fiction as escapism or ornament. She’s describing an interior method where imagination isn’t opposed to reality but competes with it on the same sensory turf. That’s the real intent: to legitimize the novel as a serious instrument of knowledge, built not from omniscience but from an almost bodily intimacy with what is not, yet must feel, real.