I don't like this argument at all. I saw somebody saying that The Wire was a black story and it should have been told by black people.... and mainly it is (a story about black communities)... but it's also the story of dockworkers and the police department and politicians and so on and so forth... and nobody is all of those things so that argument kinda makes the whole thing impossible.I think the broader point about "stay in your lane" is self-defeating as some people feel novels by straight, white men only deal with straight, white men and that that's a bad thing, but telling them to stay in their lane would be telling them to keep writing exactly those novels.
Oh come the fuck off it with this "allowed" nonsense. Who do you imagine functioning as arbitrator of books by white authors to ensure that their portrayal of non-white characters meets some standard of originality and non-stereotypicality? You going to selflessly offer your own services?if fewer self-important furrowed white brows were allowed to publish books that would be no terrible loss.
I wonder if you could advance so crude a proposition as 'the more interesting the life, the more interesting the writing'?
There has to be a baseline of lived experience, after all.
That's true, although Eliot as far as i recall used to go on recces into the more sordid areas of London on the hunt for material — and of course moved to London in the first place from America, which presumably gives you an interesting perspective in of itself. And then later on converted to Catholicism, and got married when he was in his 70s (this is all off the top of my head).
Ha, oh I see - you're talking about who should be allowed to publish novels and I'm the one being hyperbolic.do we really need to splutter in this way tea? can we not be a bit more thoughtful?