Privately, I have been asked what gives me the right to tell this story. With the book newly out, I expect to have to answer this publicly.
Sigh… I have never served in the army, nor did I fight at Culloden, yet wrote about a professional soldier who did. I am not – nor have ever been – a half-Comanche gunslinger, but that didn’t stop me writing about one. Ransom was written in the first person from a female perspective, yet I am a middle-aged man, nor am I a computer support technician (Mrs L was and kindly gave me all sorts of useful anecdotes that found their way into the narrative). My next novel centres around a detective living and working in France. I have never worked for the French police force, nor have I murdered anyone, nor stolen a large diamond. Yet I feel perfectly able to tell the story because I made it all up.
We are writers using our imagination. That is all the excuse we need. The Guardianista and their ilk can fuck right off.
It’s a good question.
No, it isn’t. It’s a bloody stupid question and should be robustly rejected as the bollocks that it is and the questioner made to look as stupid as they are.
So is there a way to navigate this difficult territory? In the words of someone who challenged me on this point, why did I think it was OK to write this book?
Yes, there is and it isn’t difficult territory at all. It just needs the cojones to be blunt. I write whatever I want to write. I follow where my imagination leads. You can like it or lump it, read it or not. What you cannot do is demand that I justify myself or try to guilt trip me with leftist identity politics, because my response will be robust and likely as not, unprintable. It’s OK because I say it is. Nowt more to be said on the matter. You, nor anyone else, gets to tell me what I may write about.
Morgan Jones, however, is the worst kind of hand-wringing buffoon who allows this kind of nonsense to propagate. Never appease these people for they will come back for more. They always come back for more – as Jack Whitehall is now discovering. There is no such thing as cultural appropriation. It is as made up as all the other bullshit the leftists are pissing all over us in the name of cultural Marxism. Indeed, it is as made up as my stories are.
So his next book will be about a totally spineless, pussified poor excuse for a doormat?
I can hardly wait
*wonders if Orwell had once been a talking pig on a 1930s British farm-after his successful escape from a future totalitarian society or if Tolkien was really a hobbit in the cunning disguise of an Oxford don.
And where do we start with science Fiction? Did Anne McCaffrey really ride a dragon?
I have no difficulty believing J.K.Rowling rode in on a quidditch stick, muttering the arcane spell ‘writum verbalum shitte expensicus’.
If fiction must be based on author’s experience, I’ll be C S Lewis
Gurnion chap seems to overlook fiction descriptor.
“Privately, I have been asked what gives me the right to tell this story.” WTF? What kind of shit-for-brains even thinks this? And why are so many of these idiots called Jones?
You have the ‘right’ to write because you’re the creator. Your brainchild, your property.
Dear Mr Longrider
That nice Mr Jones has a book to sell. I suspect sales aren’t going too well and he needs a bit more exposure.
Enter the handwringing novelist.
So what Grauniadistas really want is a novel entirely peopled by men like him? Let ’em have it.
DP
The only people who can influence the content of your stories are your public: if they like it, they’ll buy it and if they don’t, they won’t. Unless of course, the Graun wants to make it compulsory to purchase novels starring blind black pregnant** foreign nuns who are converting to islam and are to the left of the SWP.
**Pregnant by parthenogenesis of course – no straight male influence here!!