I sometimes feel like that Ancient Greek lass, the one accused of opening a box and releasing all the wickedness in the world through her curiosity and wilfulness. As a writer, I just want to have a peek, explore a situation, find out what is in that box or jar, see what might be revealed. I open the box, and look at its contents carefully. I lay them out in some sort of order, try to understand them and then find the words to name what I see. But then, suddenly, hurt and angry wasps are buzzing about my head. I didn’t mean any harm – I just wanted to look – but something has been stirred up, something out of my control has been released.
Given the disturbance that can be unleashed – and given that the writer wants to survive such disturbance – it’s clear that the ethics of opening boxes need to be thought through. The problems arise from the fact that whether it is novels, nonfiction, memoir, scripts or poetry, the stuff of literature is no more nor less than life on earth – my life, your life, the lives of everyone a writer knows or can imagine. The unavoidable reality is that writers use other people’s lives. And other people, understandably, don’t necessarily like it.
