What’s curious to me now is how this age-old advice of questionable merit has, in this time of heightened awareness of the issue of cultural appropriation, come to read more as a warning to writers: If it’s not about you or yours, it’s out of bounds. In my mulling I’ve come across two perspectives I find paticularly refreshing and emboldening.

The first was Jamaica Kincaid who observed in her 2018 address at the Key West Literary Seminar that, “All that we humans make belongs to all of us. We must take from each other in goodwill and with grace.” As we delve into the lives of others – as we must – it is our responsibility to do so with sensitivity and empathy, to inhabit those lives as deeply as possible and bring them to life outside of ourselves.

The second was Toni Morrison’s directive to her Princeton students regarding writing what you know: “Don’t pay any attention to that…because you don’t know anything. Imagine it, create it.”

There will always be stuff we encounter that is stranger than fiction. Stuff so good we’re convinced we could never make it up. But, truth be told, that’s the job, right? To make up stuff that is at least that good.