The author Nadine Gordimer said, ‘You have to write as if you’re dead.’ Meaning, I think, that you have to write as if all connections to real people and events mean nothing. As if you do not care whether people think they see themselves in your story. In a hundred years, no one will see connections. What will last, you hope, is the work.

Fiction is fiction. You use the material around you; this may include detail that people recognise. This happens: you take some experience and use it in a story. In the process it passes through the fictional filter; it is changed into something original. You blend it with other events, alter it, shape it. As a writer you do not regard it as having any connection, any more, to the real events from which it may have been partly constructed. The detail serves its purpose in a composition that is entirely of your own invention.

This does not stop people protesting indignantly, ‘How could you write about that?’; or, ‘How could you put that spin on it – that’s not the way it happened at all’; or, ‘How could you portray me in that way?’ You may say, ‘Fiction is fiction’, ‘this character is not you’ (not any more), and try to explain the process, but people don’t necessarily comprehend it. There is the potential for misunderstanding and hurt. This is, unfortunately, too bad. I may use real events, but everything I write – the entire end product – is invented. None of it is ‘real.’ No one writes in a vacuum, real detail is the raw material. You go on saying ‘fiction is fiction’ and meaning it, and hoping people will understand.

Strange days: Two days ago I sent an email to a friend who lives far away. I sent it out of the blue; I don’t know why. It said, ‘When we last met you told me a long story and I used some of it in my book.’ A message came back, out of the ether. Happiness. It said, ‘You owe me dinner. It’s a good story.’ And he said, ‘By an amazing coincidence, I was just about to start your book when I got your message.’

Today I walked down Parnell Road. I saw a person who might recognise some detail in another of my stories. He looked straight at me and didn’t know me, I don’t think. But just half an hour later, walking through town, I saw – strange day – yet another who might spot familiar detail in another story I wrote, one based partly on a real incident. I used some detail from this incident, fixed it into my own shape. And the look this person gave me was so bad that I fancied he had read it, and seen ‘himself’ in it, and that he was angry.
 
‘Fiction is fiction’ I wanted to say. It was a story in which he may have thought he recognised a young woman we both knew a long time ago. Perhaps he didn’t like the way I portrayed her. I had her sly, coy, flirty, possibly dangerous. The reality was more complex – the person we both knew may have been all of those things but she was also, for various reasons, so frightened (she told me once) that she couldn’t sleep straight in her bed. She was a walking tragedy, practically screaming for help, etc etc. But I wasn’t concerned with the truth. I was making up a story. I was writing as if I was already gone. (As she is, actually. She is, in the words of the Yeats poem, ‘changed, changed utterly.’)

I would have liked to explain all this, but we passed over it in silence. I walked home and went on writing. It’s a truism; the artist must be ruthless. It doesn’t mean the artist isn’t sorry. To you out there I have offended, believe me, it was nothing personal. I’m sorry. And if you can’t forgive me my trespasses, think of me, then, as dead.