WRITE ABOUT WHAT YOU ...  NOOOOO!!         Sherry Ashworth

One of the most puzzling pieces of advice I was ever given came from an editor some years ago.  Think of the book you’d like to read, she said, and write that!

Even now, as I type those words, my head spins.  What kind of books do I like to read?  Books that tell me something I didn’t know before.  Novels set in countries I’ve never been to.  Characters that have the type of personalities that I’ve never explored until now.  A set of circumstances I’ve never met, or a situation that has never occurred to me.  For example, one of my top reads recently was Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex, which ticks all of the above boxes.

Also, the editor’s advice seemed to conflict with that age-old writer’s mantra – write about what you know.  If I know about something – if I know about something VERY well – I might be an authority on it, but I am inevitably bored with it and want to escape.  That’s not the book I want to read!  When I write fiction I prefer to set myself a problem, to create a situation where I don’t know the outcome, so that I can resolve it alongside my reader.  It’s important that neither of us get bored.

And yet.  The novel I’m reading at the moment is Elizabeth’s Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters. 

 I chose it because it offered me familiarity.  Although I’d not read it before, I know enough of Mrs Gaskell to be certain about what I would find.  A simple, slower England, finely analysed characters, gentle comedy, masterful storytelling and most important of all for me right now, the portrayal of a whole world in which I could become fully absorbed.  I wanted a novel that would be a companion for me, one that didn’t demand too much, that didn’t test me but entertained me, that would hold my hand through some interesting personal times.  And Mrs Gaskell – you did it!  Wives and Daughters is all those things.

So I’ve been re-thinking my editor’s advice.  Sometimes when we read we don’t want a novel that turns a reader into Scott of the Antarctic.  We want a novel that comforts and reassures.  

Sometimes a familiar or nostalgic setting can do that for us.  Or a story where we can feel fairly certain that the outcome will comprise the heroine walking off into the sunset with Mr Right. 

At one time I also thought that authenticity was crucial in a novel – to write it, you had to have lived it.  Now I’m not too sure.  I’ve read too many novels which have been the result of meticulous research rather than experience, and they convince absolutely.  I give you Hilary Mantel!  I’ve learned you can decide what you want to know, find out about it, and then write the book you want to read about it!

So in fact that’s what I’m doing now, or will be doing when my writing life resumes its natural rhythms.  I will return to my research into transatlantic steamships in the 1860’s.  If any of you know anything about them, please get in touch!  

I’m actually writing as I research, because that way I hope to get the freshness of discovery into my writing, and also avoid the trap of the research that becomes an end in itself.

So I’m not so much writing about what I know, as writing about what I’m finding out.  And reading and writing pretty much simultaneously, writing the book that I’m actually reading!