Recently on Substack Notes1, Tom Cox had written some light-hearted and innocuous comment about more bits of you hurting when you get older, but being more able to shrug it off and get on with things than you would have done when young. Most people responded in a similar tone, but one chap pointed out that this was not the case for him and it was unreasonable to assume that one spoke for all.
He didn’t seem to be a follower/subscriber so was perhaps unaware that Tom Cox is a whimsical fictioneer, prone to sharing thoughts that are not meant to be taken wholly seriously, or that turn out to be extracts from his fiction. Maybe this commenter was used to reading factual reporting and thought he was being helpful in catching a stray opinion. Whatever the motivation, it chimed with an article that I’d read the first few paragraphs of in the preceding twenty-four hours (can’t now remember where, sorry) by an autistic author, some of whose fiction had been pounced on as not representing autism ‘correctly’.
Leaving aside the recent pressure for writers to disclose their own medical history or grief in order to write about certain topics, that idea of representing someone else’s experience of the same thing struck me as interesting. A few years ago I had this to say on my old Wordpress blog, about writing memoir:
Ask a couple about their last anniversary meal and one remembers everything they ate but not what music was playing in the restaurant, the other recalls the waiter’s Brummie accent but not what they had for dessert…You will remember it from a different perspective, using different prioritising filters, from your parents or siblings, your date that night, the guy sat behind you on the bus. You may have misinterpreted motives or causes at the time. You will certainly bring your own history, upbringing, fears and biases into the mix as you do whenever you read, watch or listen.
Fiction, you are no doubt crying by this point, is not memoir. It is made up. But the thing is, not all of it is, or not completely. At one end of the spectrum is the thinly-veiled autobiography, the sort of thing that is ‘fiction’ by dint of some names having been changed. But even right at the other end, in space opera or epic fantasy, the author will have used some of their own memories and feelings, even if they’re heavily disguised. The way their sister kind of crumpled when she got sacked and the mortgage rates had just gone up? That will give them a glimpse into how the one who’s been ditched for the Jupiter mission might feel. That time they had a pot on a broken wrist? Helpful for the cursed stone manacle the evil wizard has attached to the hero’s sidekick. Everything feeds in to the fiction.
Jeremy Paxman does not speak for all
The same week as the Tom Cox Note, I saw a headline for the letters page on the Guardian website that said Jeremy Paxman’s take on Parkinson’s was too bleak. For those who don’t know Paxman, he’s a journalist who’s been a fixture on British TV for decades, in current affairs and latterly as the quizmaster for University Challenge. Since retiring from his high-profile gigs due to Parkinson’s disease he’s been co-presenting a podcast about the condition. He had commented that Parkinson’s ‘makes you wish you hadn’t been born’, presumably that being how he (currently) feels about it, and possibly how some of the many other sufferers he’s spoken to feel or have felt too. The Guardian then published letters from two of their readers who saw this as simply not true, and presumably felt duty-bound to point this out in a similar manner to the commenter on Cox.
It’s not too much of a stretch to imagine Paxman in semi-retirement penning a novel; he has after all written several volumes of non-fiction. Let’s say he wants to use it as part of his general campaign to raise awareness of Parkinson’s, so he makes the central character a man in his sixties who has recently been diagnosed with the disease. The symptoms, the emotions, the reactions from friends and family he is most familiar with are his own, and thus he draws heavily upon them, just as Emma Healey drew heavily on her grandmother’s dementia for the wonderful novel Elizabeth is Missing.
The Paxman character’s symptoms and emotions will not precisely align with those of every reader with Parkinson’s, just as my mother’s Alzheimer’s symptoms do not match those of my cousin’s late mother-in-law. The aim is one believable character, not universal representation. Hopefully that character will resonate with some readers who recognise elements of their daily lives, but even in the unlikely event that Paxman has somehow had an experience unlike anyone else with Parkinson’s, that shouldn’t give readers a pass to say (as with the autistic author I mentioned earlier) that he’d got it ‘wrong’.
But, it did get me wondering about shared experience and representation of ‘reality’ in fiction. And I’m afraid I have way more questions than answers — feel free to chip in your own thoughts in the comments, or by return of email.
What if we didn’t know that Paxman had first-hand experience? Would a majority voice say he wasn’t faithfully representing the majority experience in his main character? Would he be dismissed as not having done enough research? Would he be faced with a choice between changing the character to fit expectations, or admitting at that point that he based it on his own diagnosis, his family’s response, what it meant for his own career or retirement plans? And if he ploughed on with his minority character, finally representing the experience of a few who are often unheard — replace with your minority of choice, as you think about this — would it fall flat with the majority, who don’t recognise it, don’t buy it, don’t trust it?
I would have said that I want to read about unique other lives, not only characters that represent a broadly-recognisable experience (broadly recognisable by whom, anyway?) but maybe that’s not as true as I think. Does there have to be something I recognise, for me to grab on to and find a way in to the rest?
What’s universal anyway?
I often read articles that say women do this or feel that or experience the other, and I don’t recognise it in my own life2. It irritates me when they claim to speak on behalf of all women, or all UK women, or all 40-something women, and maybe they actually mean mothers, or mothers with full-time jobs, or women in a particular income bracket or industry, or city-dwellers. It’s not (usually) that I’m denying it’s a thing, it’s more that I’m denying its universality, and for non-fiction framed like ‘I am telling you some facts that apply to all of these people’, that matters. The more I thought about it, though, the more I wondered if anything is ever really universal.
A long time ago, I was a physics undergraduate. Before I specialised in theoretical physics for years 2-4, I had twice-weekly lab sessions and I seem to recall having to write assumptions at the top of the page: I assume that the experiment is being carried out at room temperature and pressure, the metal bar is of uniform thickness, the only forces operating are… etc etc. When a writer sits down they don’t tend to write assumptions at the top of the page, but they will be there.
When I began to write this piece I assumed that my readers would be familiar with reading fiction: reasonable, given the title that will have attracted newbies, and probable reasons for subscribers to have subscribed. I did not assume that they would all know who Jeremy Paxman is, since Substack tells me I have subscribers based in the USA. When I’m writing fiction, I might assume all kinds of things about my readers — they know what a parent-child relationship feels like, or what it is to fall in love, or that they’ve caught a bus or made a cup of tea — and I may or may not be justified. Where I get that assumption wrong, is where the problems lie.
I thought about two main author/reader situations where the reader might feel jarred:
The reader has been there before, but their experience doesn’t gel with what the author is presenting;
The reader has no similar experience to draw on.
To take a trivial example for the first type (though we could go back to Paxman’s fictional fiction) let’s look at buses. I would ordinarily assume that everyone reading or listening to my fiction has travelled by bus. Now I come to think of it, that might not be true; I don’t know how common bus use is in the USA for example, and though my London-based friend assures me that buses are used by the great and the good down there, in West Yorkshire there’s a bit more of a class divide. In rural parts there’s a bus scarcity.
OK, so maybe not everyone’s caught a bus, but everyone knows what they look like and how they operate, don’t they? When I moved to Edinburgh in 2000, I was used to double-decker buses having a single door at the front beside the driver, though I had seen London buses on TV with a rear door as well. Edinburgh buses had a front door and a halfway-along door, the former for getting on and the latter for getting off, as I was told in no uncertain terms the first time I caught a bus in Edinburgh and tried to disembark where I’d come in.
In the rural parts that do have buses, they often don’t have bus stops and the bus will stop anywhere it’s safe to do so. I’m told that in London there isn’t a concept of ‘Sunday service’; good luck getting a bus round here on a Sunday. Before card payments became common — which happened in different places at different times — some bus companies gave change and some were exact coins only. Some do return tickets, some singles only. You get the picture.
So if I have a character getting off a bus and brushing past someone waiting to get on at the same door, knocking the carefully-counted coins out of their hand, that might seem odd to some readers, it will jar with the way they’re naturally picturing the scene. In this example because it’s minor, most people would blink and move on (I assume…). If it’s a bigger disconnect though, or if the reader doesn’t have an open enough mind or wide enough experience to allow for things being different from the way they already know, you’re in trouble.
Welcome to my world
The more confident or unquestioning you are about your place in the world, the more assumptions you’re likely to make: of course everyone will know about the tube in London, or Oxbridge colleges, or that there are such things as private GPs, and everyone will think Brexit was a mistake and Grimsby is synonymous with grim3.
Despite that, there will be times when every writer is in the second of our situations: the reader has not been here before. There will always be some minority of readers who won’t have, and I don’t think an author can anticipate that and explain everything. It might be like that time I failed to understand the motivations and wine-drinking in a lightly amusing romantic novel for which I was clearly not the target audience. However, there will be cases where the majority of readers are unlikely to have been there before, and that’s where it gets tricky.
Quick aside: with SFF the author is to some extent going to be in this situation all the time. However, although none of us have experienced the Vogons coming to blow up the planet as they do at the start of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, we probably all recognise bureaucracy and jobsworths, and have a friend/sibling/cousin who we follow against our better judgement, though we have a nagging feeling we’ll regret it in the morning. Thus does the author of the fantastic lead us gently into uncharted waters. Now read on…
I might, at some future date when it doesn’t make me wince as much, choose to use as fiction-fuel that time when I derailed and damaged one of my dad’s ride-on model steam trains. Now I’m fairly sure that driving steam trains is a minority pastime, so I wouldn’t assume that anyone reading the resulting fiction would have any experience of it. I would probably have to explain what the thing was in the first place4. I may be able to nudge the reader into making a connection with borrowing a treasured car and knocking the wing mirror off, as a more familiar version of the same sort of disaster. The point is, I know I’m out on my own here and it’s an unusual scene. What happens when I don’t think it is?
We are all the common point in a set of overlapping categories, for example Zoroastrians, Man Utd supporters, men, accountants, slipper-wearers, citizens of Liversedge. Some of those categories are small if you look at the UK as a whole, but huge within our own lives and circles, and it can feel weird or even offensive to be asked to explain (or worse, leave a characteristic out so that you don’t have to explain — ‘does the main character have to be gay..?’). And you know if you stick to your guns then the only other slipper-wearing, Man Utd supporting, male Zoroastrian accountant in Liversedge will find fault. It doesn’t even have to be a minority category in the whole UK. The majority of people in the UK have not been to university. The majority of literary agents and people working in publishing have, so those gatekeepers will see a non-graduate as unusual.
So what am I saying? I’m not sure, is the honest answer. As a reader I want to read about many different individuals but I don’t like it when I feel shut out, and I feel a disconnect when something I don’t see as normal is put across as normal for a category that I fall into. As a writer I want to be able to have a cynical bisexual forty-something cat-lover from West Yorkshire as my main sitcom character5 without worrying that nobody knows where Skipton is and most listeners will be heterosexual. I also want her to be able to just happen to be bisexual (it has been explicitly mentioned only once I think, in 9 episodes) rather than it only be allowable for a plot point.
Do I need to be a more open-minded reader, or does it not matter if I stay in my preferred niches (I read 40-odd books a year, while there are millions of new ones published)? Should I think about all the potential readers and listeners who don’t recognise my fictional worlds and make it easier for them? Or write what feels true to me and assume I’ll bring enough people along for the ride?
If you have thoughts then feel free to reply or comment.
Like Twitter but more civilised, and with unrestricted length — for those of you who get the emails but don’t visit the website.
Why do I keep reading these articles?
This, of course, is me assuming my readers will recognise and appreciate a side-swipe at middle-class London-based literary fiction types.
British readers — or perhaps provincial British readers — may have run across them at summer fairs: they are fully working steam locomotives somewhere between 6 inches and a foot high, behind which you tether benches for passengers.
Lee-Ann’s Spare Fridays, my monologue sitcom: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/jysaville
I enjoyed this post very much and it resonates with me in lots of ways. I think you’re so right that representation (and other important things like understanding and empathy) are about much more than whether or not you fit certain categories of, say, gender, ethnicity, or class. It’s demeaning to anyone who does fit category X to assume that they are ‘representative’ of it, or (the other side of the coin) that the only story that they might have to tell is about their experience of being an X. (Which is a reductio ad absurdum, but it’s not so far from the way some people come across when they sound off about this.)
This may of course be self justification because I’m a poor match for the main character in my series. She’s female, not exactly white, and she’s 19 at the opening of the first book. But she’s the one who came to the fore as I was writing and demanded I tell her story, and she’s still at the centre as I am finishing the fourth book.
And I can’t be getting it totally wrong as the majority of my 5* reviews are from female readers.