fiction part 2

Can't show you the whole thing, because it's a pressie currently in the mail. But pretty, no?

So, but fiction. “Write what you know”? Really? But what on earth would be the point? And how monumentally dull. “Here is the story of me and myself and my life and everything I do and think and say, in exactly the way I always do and think and say it.” If everyone wrote what they knew, there’d be no Mister Pip, no The Book Thief, no My Name Was Judas. Isn’t the whole point of fiction in fact writing what you don’t know, because otherwise, er, it wouldn’t be fictional? Don’t we pay fiction writers for their imagination?

Sorry. Fiction writers earning money. Let us pick ourselves up off the floor and hold our aching sides.

There again, if people didn’t write what they knew, there’d be no Kindness of Strangers, which was my favourite book of 2007. I wonder how much of Edwin + Matilda there'd be? We'd hope at least the brutality was completely imaginary. (Mostly I wonder when some publisher outside of NZ will be clever enough to pick this one up).

In other news, the apartment has a Smell suspiciously as if something’s Gone Off in the fridge, only I’ve checked, and nothing’s Gone Off in the fridge. Which suggests, more worryingly, that something may have gone off Somewhere Other Than the Fridge.

You see? Writing what you know. Not always preferable.