Without authors who cross the boundary from what they know to what they imagine, we would have a poor library. We have people writing from the point of view of someone with learning difficulties, from the point of view of an alien, an animal and most common of all, people who write historical fiction from the middle ages to the second World War and beyond.Īnd thank goodness for those books that tell us something about other worlds and other lives. So we have men writing as women as in Thomas Hardy or Henry James, we have women writing as men – Donna Tartt and Iris Murdoch. We have to have a murder or two, a broken heart, a bank robbery, a ride in a spaceship.īut what those writers, Flaubert and Bronte, had in common is that they made you feel they did know those lives, that they did have those experiences.
As writers we have to make things up if we want to spin a good yarn. Was there ever any worse advice than write what you know? Who of the greats ever wrote what they knew? Did Charlotte Bronte live in a grand country house with a man called Edward Rochester who tried to commit bigamy with her before she wrote Jane Eyre? Was Gustave Flaubert a woman who committed adultery before he wrote Madame Bovary? And how many of us could write a good book if we only wrote what we know? I would have to write about a middle-aged woman who lives in a midlands town, visits Tesco and tends her garden.
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