A real writer like Joanne Harris and Nicky Pellegrino

Yesterday, I took part in a session at the Christchurch Writers' Festival, chaired by the delightful Graham Beattie, that looked at how fiction both embellishes and reflects the "stuff of life" - a subject that is increasingly close to my heart. It was a wonderful experience, up on the stage with Joanne Harris and Nicky Pellegrino, pretending I was a real writer like them, talking about writing and even, at the end, getting asked some questions ( I thought they'd all be for Joanne Harris) and to sign some books (ditto).

As my fiction has become closer and closer to reality, I’ve become interested in what Chris Cleve said at the festival: the blurring of the line between fact and fiction, the blending of make-believe with what really happened – yesterday or years ago. I think it’s a very interesting development in fiction – making us think about how real life informs the best fiction and fiction mirrors real life. Because it’s in fiction – in the way that characters behave and react to an issue – that stimulates us, often unconsciously, to form our values about that issue.

I was heartened to hear Kate Grenville say that “the reality of life is so fascinating – you could never make it up!” And that anything we could imagine is still not as interesting as life itself”. And I found this when writing “In Her Mothers’ Shoes” – that some of the things that actually happened to my mothers make the book far more quirky and interesting than anything I could have made up.I think it’s this sense of reality – that the events in a novel could actually have happened – that people like about a book. They’re not expected to suspend disbelief interminably while vampires and changelings and all sorts of other incredible beings do weird things to each other. I’ve become an avid advocate for good old-fashioned realism in literature. I don’t care that all this fantasy fiction is selling by the billion. I’m all for the stuff of life we can believe in – the sort of fiction where the reader recognises the situation, but it takes them a little bit further than reality into realms of imagining, so that they can identify, but they are also transported out of themselves to inhabit, for a few hours, somebody else’s world… to live through somebody else’s seemingly mundane but nevertheless gripping problems and recognise, in the pages of the book, their own world – and make it seem all the better for it.