Hi guys!
I've just started writing a short story based on the Grenfell Tower fire. The tower in my story has a different name, but it's a council tower block in London that's destroyed by a fire in which many residents die, so the basis is obvious. To research it, I read news reports about the fire and interviews with survivors and drew on those while writing it, but I changed some details to make the plot work. The bulk of the story isn't about the fire itself - it's about my narrator, a 16-year-old girl, coping with the aftermath as she and her family try to find new housing, but there's a flashback to the fire.
From a personal viewpoint, I want to continue writing this story. I think it's good and the writing is flowing easily, which is something I haven't felt about my writing for a long time. However, I'm worried that it's not ethical to write about such a horrible real-world tragedy. I'm not sure when is considered 'too soon' to write about such things. Grenfell was nearly two years ago. Jonathan Safran Foer published Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close four years after 9/11. I recently read and loved Mohsin Hamid's Exit West, which combines magical realism with scenes obviously based on ongoing events such as the Syrian war and the refugee crisis. I certainly believe it's possible to write about any real-life tragedy if you do so with sensitivity and respect, which is what I'm aiming to do here. However, I can't help thinking that if I was a Grenfell Tower survivor or a relative of the victims and I read the story, I would be angry and offended, and I think that matters.
What are your opinions?
I've just started writing a short story based on the Grenfell Tower fire. The tower in my story has a different name, but it's a council tower block in London that's destroyed by a fire in which many residents die, so the basis is obvious. To research it, I read news reports about the fire and interviews with survivors and drew on those while writing it, but I changed some details to make the plot work. The bulk of the story isn't about the fire itself - it's about my narrator, a 16-year-old girl, coping with the aftermath as she and her family try to find new housing, but there's a flashback to the fire.
From a personal viewpoint, I want to continue writing this story. I think it's good and the writing is flowing easily, which is something I haven't felt about my writing for a long time. However, I'm worried that it's not ethical to write about such a horrible real-world tragedy. I'm not sure when is considered 'too soon' to write about such things. Grenfell was nearly two years ago. Jonathan Safran Foer published Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close four years after 9/11. I recently read and loved Mohsin Hamid's Exit West, which combines magical realism with scenes obviously based on ongoing events such as the Syrian war and the refugee crisis. I certainly believe it's possible to write about any real-life tragedy if you do so with sensitivity and respect, which is what I'm aiming to do here. However, I can't help thinking that if I was a Grenfell Tower survivor or a relative of the victims and I read the story, I would be angry and offended, and I think that matters.
What are your opinions?