It’s my life - or is it?

One of the most common and enduring pieces of advice for aspiring writers is that you should base your first novel, in particular, on lived experience.  For the sake of argument, I’m going to call this the autobiographical fallacy.

I understand why the advice is offered.  Firstly, it’s very hard to come up with a wholly original and engaging idea from nowhere. And secondly, the level of research needed to bring an imaginary world to life for the reader is daunting to the point of off-putting for many.  If you’ve lived in that world and know exactly how everything works, down to the smallest detail, you’ve pretty much done the research already without knowing it.  Result!

So why do I call it the autobiographical fallacy?  That’s simple.  If you took the advice literally, you could never write about anything that you hadn’t experienced.  To state the obvious (as I often do), if you’ve spent your life as a teacher working in a junior school, your first novel must be (and can only be) about a teacher working in a junior school.  Had Daniel Defoe taken the autobiographical advice, he would never have written Robinson Crusoe and Bram Stoker wouldn’t have written Dracula.

But is that wholly true?  Let’s look a little closer at the example of Bram Stoker.  In her excellent book Bram Stoker And The Man Who Was Dracula, Barbara Belford assembles a persuasive argument that Count Dracula was largely inspired by the charismatic character of the mesmerising and domineering actor Henry Irving for whom Stoker worked as manager and what would now be called a personal assistant.  The suggestion is that Stoker used his lived experience as inspiration and the framework upon which he could build his story.  But, importantly, it was a story about a vampire and not a Victorian actor.  And for me, that’s the essence of what the autobiographical bit is really about.  It’s about using lived experience as a basis upon which you can expand and embellish, imaginatively. The important bit is what you do with it.

The reason I started to think about this is that I’ve led a pretty boring life but my latest effort – a comic novel entitled U WISH! (coming out on 1st September) – undoubtedly borrows from it.  It’s about a guy who works in a Catholic Primary School in Brighton – as I did.  What actually happens in the novel is not wholly autobiographical (very obviously or the novel would be hugely dull or, looked at another way, my life would have been whole lot more interesting) but I couldn’t have written it without the lived experience that forms the background.  On the other hand, BAGMAN, my first novel – therefore the one at which the advice is most usually aimed – was about as autobiographical as Robinson Crusoe in that the life experience was second-hand, coming, as it did, from conversations I’d had with those who had lived the appropriate lives in the music business.  In both of those examples, there are autobiographical elements but they’re a long way from being my life story.

So those are my thoughts on the matter.  Don’t, whatever you do, be put off by the idea that you must take the autobiographical advice literally – unless you’ve led a very exciting and story-shaped life, of course!  In which case, I look forward to reading the resulting novel.

Happy writing!