NEVER Write What You Know.

Let me tell you a little story about my friend Sheldon (his name is Sheldon).

Sheldon.

Sheldon lives in the East End of London, but he grew up in the US and moved to England with his family about forty years ago. Even though he has lived here for most of his life, Sheldon knows that he will always be something of an outsider in the UK, which is one of the reasons he loves living in London. Quite apart from the genuine thrill of a big bustling city with its crowds and traffic and chaos (Sheldon likes to say that you can trust the air in London because you can see it) Sheldon loves living in a city where millions of people from diverse cultures and backgrounds have deliberately chosen to live together in a messy, sometimes futile attempt to create a cohesive, functioning community. 

Like Sheldon himself, almost every Londoner has an "origin story"; something that brought them on a path from wherever they were, and led them to London. They may not share a religion, an ethnicity, a language or even a concept of gender, but they do share a desire to make a life for themselves in this city. And for Sheldon, that is what makes a "tribe". His tribe.

Paradoxically, it was Sheldon's specific love of London that would ultimately prove to be his downfall.

Having lived in his East London neighbourhood since the 1990s, Sheldon has witnessed all manner of changes and upheavals, good and bad. Part of him is sad to see his beloved city drowning in what (to him) feels like a tsunami of hatred and bigotry, but Sheldon likes to think that he plays his own humble role in holding back the tide of those negative elements. Although he knows he will never be more than a slightly eccentric minor thread in the larger fabric of London's tapestry, Sheldon takes quiet (and mostly unexpressed) pride in the thought that no one's life has ever been worse for an encounter with him.

No one, that is, until a fateful encounter one night that changed everything, and brought Sheldon face to face with his own demons.

So, what do you think? Are you hooked? Would you like to keep reading? Would you be interested in paying me millions of pounds to develop this into a prestigious series on Netflix?

What this is, of course, is a demonstration of probably the single most oft-repeated piece of advice ever to be hurled at aspiring writers. 

Forget about genres, forget about character development, narrative structure or even the most basic rules of grammar. Anyone who has ever felt the urge to put metaphorical pen to paper is guaranteed to have been subjected to this most primal piece of advice: "Write What You Know."

On the surface, it sounds reasonable. After all, a comfortably middle-class suburban white guy with an ex-wife and a teenage son he gets to see twice a month (for example) is probably going to have limited insights into the mind-set of a pregnant teenage immigrant girl living on the streets because her fundamentalist father tried to kill her. (The reverse is probably equally true.)

In my case, "Write what you know" would mean (as above) writing about a slightly introverted non-native Londoner who lives in the East End and likes to use a weekly film presentation as a springboard for discussions of various cultural and sociological issues. Okay, so I'm dramatically over-simplifying, but you get the idea.

Not Sheldon.

In truth, many successful writers are happy to push back against this rather limiting concept, and there are plenty of nuanced and intelligent conversations to be had on the subject. Those who teach creative writing also like to stress that "Write what you know" doesn't simply mean "Write yourself" - it's more about understanding and empathising with your subject matter. Unfortunately, this interpretation often runs up against the modern state of Identity Politics, where (for instance) a straight white man trying to express the character of a black lesbian Muslim is regarded as the worst kind of cultural imperialism. Thus many aspiring writers elect to remain in the comparative safety of their own lanes.

West Side Story (written by predominantly gay Jewish New York liberals) is now glibly dismissed as racist cultural appropriation in some circles.

But quite aside from any other objections, there is the simple fact that writing and Reality are two different things.

When we convey something in writing (whether it's nominally "fact" or "fiction") we are effectively creating it in a brand new medium. A sentence like "The young man walked down the alley" is an assemblage of letters of the alphabet; quite separate from the actual man walking down the actual alley. It may be an obvious point to make, but the sentence can exist whether or not the young man walks down that alley.

Tempting though it may be for a writer to remain close to his or her own... alley... and refrain from writing stories about other people's alleys, there is a danger that readers will simply assume that everything this author writes is autobiographical. If the author is (for example) a neurotic Jewish New Yorker who writes almost exclusively about neurotic Jewish New Yorkers, then readers will inevitably wonder whether every line of text is a self portrait.

It needn't be thus. Even if the author creates a character that is 100% intended as a simulacrum of him-or-herself, the written character exists in a different medium (vowels and consonants replacing flesh and blood).

A portrait of the artist, and "Portrait of the Artist". Not the same thing.

Scientists and sociologists who study robotics and computer-generated imaging have identified a psychological phenomenon they now call the "Uncanny Valley".

A graphic representation of the "Uncanny Valley".
The more "almost" human a robot appears, the more disturbing it appears to be.

In a nutshell, it has been observed that photo-realistic avatars and humanoid robots become increasingly unsettling to audiences as they get closer and closer to "human" reality. A completely non-human android is viewed as less disturbing than a 99% human android (or CGI-generated character) as audiences fixate on that missing one percent and perceive the resulting character as "disturbingly unnatural".

Robby the Robot is adorable. But a completely "human" android is just creepy.

Curiously, the "uncanny valley" effect can also be applied to fiction. If a written character is clearly modelled after the author's Reality, then readers fixate on every nuance and detail that might offer a clue to the author's inner persona - even if a work is intended to be entirely fictional.

Take the little piece of drivel about "Sheldon" that I included at the top of this page as an example: suppose I were to write a story in which Sheldon gets caught up in a torrid affair with someone from those weekly film presentations. It's just a piece of fiction, and I can hypothetically do anything I want with Sheldon: I can give him an eating disorder; I can have him murder someone; I can make him question his sexuality etc etc. But the closer to me Sheldon appears to be, the more people will read portent into every little thing I elect to do with the character.

If you're not careful, "Write What You Know" can blow up in your face.

The Passionate Stranger (released in the US as A Novel Affair) is a 1957 film written and directed by Muriel Box, starring Margaret Leighton and Ralph Richardson.

Margaret Leighton plays Judith Wynter, a successful author of rather sentimental bodice-rippers, who decides to base her latest opus rather too closely on her immediate household. When her driver reads the manuscript, he jumps to some erroneous but completely understandable conclusions about Judith's innermost thoughts and desires.

Muriel Box was one of the very few female directors working in Britain in the mid-20th Century, and she and her co-writer/husband Sidney were probably most famous for The Seventh Veil, their Oscar-winning 1945 melodrama about the tortured and masochistic relationship between a talented young pianist and her overbearing teacher-cum-guardian.

The Seventh Veil is rather irreverently referenced in The Passionate Stranger, and everyone watching the film in 1957 would immediately have spotted the connection. "Write What You Know" indeed...

I have written before about Slash Fiction, and writers who use fiction as a means of escaping their own oppressive Realities. 

But that is entirely the point of fiction in general: it exists independently of the real world, and authors are effectively omnipotent gods, deciding exactly what happens, and to whom. Authors who consciously limit themselves to the world as it actually exists are not only narrowing the potential of their fictional universe, they are also potentially impacting the people in their social circles who might react adversely to whatever they have to say.

It's fiction. It doesn't need to be real. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Yeah, right.

We will screen The Passionate Stranger at 7.30 on Thursday, the 30th of April at the Victoria Park Baptist Church.