Spring 2015
The Most
Embarrising Moment
My Favourite
Childhood Memor y
The Best Decisio n
That I Ever Made
Weirdest Thing That Ever
Happened to Me
Tell Me The Story of One of
Your Scars
The Biggest Lie
That I Ever Told
And Its Consequences
Best
Day Ever
Subject Matters
by
Bruce Harris
nce the decision to write has been made, the next step is to decide what to write about. For many
people, unfortunately, this first hurdle is the one they stumble over so badly that they never get back
up. For others, the choice is obvious; with particular interests and experience in one of the prominent genres such as sports, science, historical or crime writing, they can immediately make use of their
professional lives in their fiction writing. Genre writing has limitations and restrictions of its own,
and many people who have taken the decision to write will be reluctant to be pushed so severely in
an unnecessarily narrow direction from the start.
The conventional wisdom is to “write from experience”, but that, again, imposes restrictions of
its own, limiting people to their own time, country and reality. Imagination is one of the characteristics
which distinguish fiction from more functional forms of writing, and unless a person has had a
particularly exotic or unusual life, the number of situations and settings which one life makes available
may not be a sufficiently rich resource for many people.
It is also clear enough that a successful writer has to be able to stand in other people’s shoes.
Men who can only write about men, and women who can only write about women, will quickly find
themselves operating in an awkwardly narrow world and alienating half of their potential readership.
Similarly, young people who are unable or unwilling to attempt to get into the minds of their elders,
and older people who have lost all sense of what being young was about, will be straitjacketing
themselves from the beginning.
The Linnet's Wings