Reality

When you talk to writers, one of the subjects that evokes some of the most passionate debate is the blurring between reality and fiction.

There are those writers who argue that stories come out of real life experiences, that the writer has gone through tough times therefore they are able to best tell the story.

This may be true to a degree. When I was writing my first novels as a teenager, I tended to write about aliens and war zones and my father’s constant mantra was ‘write about what you know’. They were wise words - wise words now, wise words then - but the problem was that I did not know anything. I was a schoolboy, what could I know?

Now, aged fifty something, I know so much. Too much in many ways. I know what deep personal loss feels like, know what it is like to be diagnosed with illnesses, know what it is like to see loved ones suffer, know what it is like to be made redundant by employers. To me, it is inevitable that those experiences inform my writing.

Others, however, recoil from that approach, arguing that that the key is in the word ‘fiction‘, that stories should come entirely out of imagination. These writers - and let me say from the outset that there are no rights and wrongs here - say they do not wish to draw from personal experience but would rather let their imagination run riot.
Like I said, no one is right, no one is wrong on this one, but as I look back on the novels I have had published, all of them hold some kind of truth, a place visited, a person seen, a comment heard, a story experienced. Does that mean I am still writing fiction? Very much so but it also means that there’s a lot of me in there as well. And I’m fine with that.