I read a newspaper article recently which was talking about the lived experience of writers. I wasn’t totally sure that I understood what they meant, so I read on. In essence it was saying that some publishers had been telling authors that unless they had lived through the subject matter of their novel, they should not be writing it. It takes a while to think through that as it seems quite an extraordinary statement. Of course, fortunately anyone can write whatever they wish, we don’t live in a 1984 scenario with the thought police checking up on us. However, if you are aiming to get your novel published, well that seems to be where the problems may start. Publishers need to make money and many have become highly sensitive to critical condemnation and social censure, indeed to anything that might cause legal problems or might result in the book being banned or ostracised. So if your story contains a person who has been abused or imprisoned and you haven’t personally experienced either situation then you shouldn’t write about it. Really? I know Jane Austen felt you should write about the world you knew but this is taking things to ridiculous extremes.
One word seems to be missing here and it is: imagination. Surely this is what novelists do, they imagine conflicts, happenings, and they put their characters in all sorts of difficult, dangerous and unlikely situations. They do not have to have lived them themselves. In the theatre, some actors (not so many these days) believe in method acting. Thus if they were playing someone who had been in solitary confinement for a time, the actor would put himself through this experience, believing it would make their acting better. They are forgetting that we are blessed with imagination.
In the article, the author Kazuo Ishiguro says this:
‘The freedom of creative people to be able to write from the point of view of whomever they wish is fundamental.’
Surely it is up to the reader to decide if the author has made a good job of his description, of his plot and story. Apparently there is a small indie British publishing company called Swift Press which is taking on books that others will not. Bless them.
Long live the novel!