Am I allowed? by Sandra Horn

Recently, I was asked, by a Scottish Person, ‘What’s the connection? You wrote The Silkie and Tattybogle – what’s your connection to Scotland?’ I wasn’t sure if this was an aggressive challenge or what. In any case, the answer  - which I didn’t give because other things intervened before I could – was complicated. My name before I married was MacDonald and there is both Scottish and Irish ancestry there, but it was my name by adoption, not blood. I’m English with a dollop of Cornish, so I could claim a connection that allows me to write about The Mud Maid and The Giant, and I grew up in Sussex, so The Hob and Miss Minkin is probably permissible too. 

My play for children, very loosely based on the Aboriginal dreamtime myths, is apparently taboo, however.

Wait a minute, though: there’s the possibility of an ancestral name linked to Ashkenazy Jews who came over in the 17^th century. Hooray! That opens up more possibilities!

Yes, this is me wading into the debate about who can write what, which seems to be increasingly in the air and which I, for one, am finding increasingly silly and irritating.

Write about what you know? What does that mean? If we could only write about our own direct experiences, we wouldn’t have most of the world’s great literature. Of course, if we write about what we don’t know, using this thing called imagination or creativity, we need to get any factual stuff right, but that’s a straightforward matter of research. If we want to write in the persona of a character from Outer Mongolia, or a nine-year-old boy, or someone suffering from dementia, say, these call for prodigious leaps of imagination and facts and technical skill, with a large dose of sensitivity in some cases, but are not impossible and not, in any sense, wrong. Then there’s pure fantasy, which needs to engage and convince readers but otherwise is not bound by rules about who can and who can’t.

Enough of this outrage, genuine or manufactured. Just, is it a good story, well told? Does it patronise, belittle, distort or demonise its characters?  Does it contain misinformation about them or their situations?  If it is an honest and engaging piece of work, does it matter who wrote it?

While I’m at it, there’s an increasing tendency for those requesting submissions of work to say that they are especially interested in writing from BAME, LGBT, disabled and ‘other minority groups’. This was taken to a further level at a recent call-out, when writers were asked if their CHARACTERS were from one of the groups. I was wryly amused by this. My submitted poems were about Eve, the Madonna del Parto and Scheherezade. Eve? Definitely BAME, although, curiously, often depicted as blonde. The Madonna? Hmm. Middle-eastern, but as painted by Piero della Francesca she’s pale skinned and sandy haired… Scheherezade might have been any colour from olivey to black, but she could be regarded as trafficked for sex slavery, so perhaps that ticks a box?  I finally ticked N/A because there wasn’t room to expand on all this, and anyway, they are mythological, by and large.

 As a writer, I don’t tick any boxes, alas. I’m a woman married to a man. I’m ‘white’ (or pinko-beige to be more accurate) and freckled. I’m short-sighted, a bit hard of hearing, a bit arthritic with a scoliosed spine but I don’t think that counts as it doesn’t hold me back, or not a lot. I’m old, but that doesn’t seem to count either; us wrinklies are far from a minority group. I’m unlikely to write about any of that anyway. It may be my direct experience but it would be no kind of fun for a reader. I’ll stick to mythological creatures and inventions.

What about this as an idea: all submission should be anonymous at the outset? Then the only boxes any of us should worry about ticking are:

Are you literate?

Have you got something to say?

Can you write a fantastically good story about it?