After hearing last year about Boris Johnson’s thriller, then about Saddam Hussein’s romance novels, I got thinking about why people from all sorts of backgrounds are drawn to writing fiction. Reading them, I’m struck by two thoughts, firstly by how easy lots of professional writers make writing fiction look, and secondly by how much you can come to understand a person by the way they write.
Are there any novels you know of from unexpected authors? Have you found any that are decent as books apart from their creators? What is it about novels that draws non-writers that’s missing from, say, pottery or interpretive dance?
“People you wouldn’t expect to write fiction” write the best fiction.
Take, for example, my favorite childhood author: Brian Jacques.
He wrote the Redwall series.
He left school at 15 to work (very common then) as a merchant sailor. He then went on to be a milkman. He eventually had a radio program on the Liverpool BBC that focused on opera.
He was dissatisfied with the children’s literature that existed for the kids at the school for the blind he delivered milk to… so he wrote his own!
I think that truly thoughtful literature cannot be written by authors who have not gone out and experienced life. There’s a richness that experience adds to writing, that simply cannot be mimicked by a person who hasn’t lived outside of their MFA bubble. It’s flat, somehow.
ngl, it’s one of the reasons I think my husband’s book is so good :) He only turned to writing later in life, after experiencing many ups and downs, and without his vast accumulation of life experience, I don’t think his characters would be anywhere near as complex and rich as they are :)
MFA?