[mydongle]

Wait, but don't writers usually already do real research into whatever they're going to write about? If I did research on what Belgian nuns did in their life and wrote about it, is that wrong? Is that less accurate than if the Belgian nun wrote it herself? The thing is, most Belgian nuns probably are never going to write a book and especially not the book that I wanted to write. I hope we don't start banning people from writing about things they've never experienced, because that's the point of fiction and imagination. I've never slayed a dragon, but I can write about doing so because I imagined it. Sigh, one day probably only black people will be allowed to write black characters huh? Or maybe you have to pay a black person for their input and account and for them to endorse your writing?

[philipkglass]

Russo approaches this in a less combative way than you have framed it. He has imaginative power: what does it do to him, what does he do with it, and what should he do with it? He hasn't definitively answered these questions even after 5000 words of pondering. It's the opposite of a Twitter hot take telling other people what they are allowed to do.

Authors do variable amounts of research to background their characters. Sometimes shockingly little. Many HN readers can probably relate to encountering an eyeball-rolling "hacking" scene in a thriller. It's possible that a diligent author can write a character of a certain background just as well never having lived it, but the odds are not in their favor.

The not-having-lived-it problem leads to some interesting challenges with historical fiction. Nobody alive today has been a 14th century French knight. Which authors really try to do their research and don't just treat time and place as set dressing for generic drama? How much work am I going to do as a reader to discover these harder-working authors? Sometimes I wonder: should I just dive in to scholarly source material about medieval history instead of reading novels set there? Sometimes the answer is "yes, just read history."

[NateEag]

This touches nicely on why I have always preferred science fiction, fantasy, fairy tales, and mythology to historical fiction:

When the whole thing is fiction, you don't need to fuss about which parts are historically accurate.

Historical fiction must necessarily be a blending of truth and lies, and as such it has never held my interest.