Creates, Sweats and Publishes

I’m always pleased when I hear of authors who set their stories in places they haven’t been. Most of my fictional writing is set in places I have been, and I even embarked on a trip to parts of Africa, as my current writing project is set in Zimbabwe. I never made it to Zimbabwe (due to a mugging incident in Cape Town which occurred within four hours of our arrival there), and this has always remained as an uneasy disconnect in my writing process (as well as in my life in general). I have continued the piece, but with much more research into the landscapes, botany and customs of the region.

So I was gratified to hear that the winner of the Costa Book of the Year Award, Stef Penney, set her novel The Tenderness of Wolves in the wilderness of Canada; a place she had never been. Her writing was based on research she had done in the British Library (partly due to her agoraphobia, as was widely reported).

But then along comes Lynn Truss, she of Eats, Shoots and Leaves fame, with this article in which she scoffs at the idea that writers must “write what they know” (a concept that was first taught to me by Natalie on the Facts of Life back in ’86, just as I was finishing my first short story, Sandy Runs Away, a bittersweet tale of a mongrel dog who runs away from a mean family into the arms of an 11 year-old girl with striking similarities to the tenderfoot author, who, coincidently, wouldn’t stop asking her parents for a dog).

Truss writes: “The thing is, we fiction writers are quite touchy when people fail to appreciate the supreme importance of imagination in our work. I love the idea of Penney constructing the landscape of her book from maps and records in the British Library. That was a true creative act. Any fool with a Visa card can buy a ticket and go to look at an expanse of snow.”

I do see her point: a good author relies on their imagination and abilities as a wordsmith to present a scene and transport their reader to a different place and time. And granted, novels have been set in the past (and future) by authors who haven’t actually lived during those times, so why can’t space be as negotiable as time?

But still, there lingers within me that troubled disassociation from my setting that leaves me lacking literary confidence: I can’t properly describe the msasa trees or the sounds of the dark nights, even when people show me pictures or try to evoke a scene for me. No matter how often I re-read Alexandra Fuller, I still don't have a complete sense of Zimbabwe. The smell of wet cedar leaves that lie browning over lichen-covered rocks in Algonquin is easy. So is the gentle slope of Church Lane, Tooting, with its orange-bricked Victorian row houses, windows framed by lace curtains. It takes little effort to picture the brilliant sun bouncing off waves in Sydney Harbour, the unexpected smell of Chinese jasmine wafting by. But I lose all creative confidence when writing scenes in locales I haven’t been to.

But maybe this is the old adage that writing is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration. When you “write what you know,” there's a little less sweating. When you must describe a place you are unfamiliar with, you have to do a bit of research to write with familiarity. Stef Penney chose to sweat it out in the British Library for her book – perhaps my apprehension to write about Zimbabwe comes not from a fear of unknown places (and repeat muggings), but from a fear of Truss's proclaimed "true creative act": constructing a time and place through a combination of some imagination (say, 10%) and a whole lot of sweating.