I had a really bright idea for my third novel, <em>Solstice.</em> I started writing it in 1996. That meant it was probably going to come out in early 1999. By that time millennial fever was going to be gripping the world, wasn't it? So why not write a story about the end of the world? How cool would that be? Good timing or what?

Well <em>Solstice is</em> certainly an end-of-the-world tale but it's not tied to any date or event in history. Just as well really. Because being topical in a book is about as dumb as you can get, as an editor cheerfully pointed out to me when I raised this possibility. Yet time and time again would-be writers make the mistake of thinking real-world news can generate unreal-world fiction. And mostly it can't.

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One practical problem has to do with the nature of the space time continuum. That thing moves on. Your book won't. Example: the world economic crash of 2008. I'll bet agents and publishers got a flurry of submissions in the middle of that for popular fiction set directly inside the curiously uncertain world we found ourselves in back then. On the surface the idea of a story from that time looks attractive. It's everywhere: in the papers, on the TV, in people's heads. When you start writing it nothing may make <em>less</em> sense.

Nine months later you finish it. The crisis is still going on. People are thinking, yawn... Even worse, if a publisher accepted your book it would take perhaps twelve to twenty four months to bring it to the public. The odds are that by then no one in the world will want to read yesterday's news. And also that something real will have happened that may have drastically changed the premise of your story. What publisher wants to take that risk?

Here's a related truth too: people read fiction for the internal reality of a book, not its relation to the real world (usually). When London suffered that ghastly terrorist attack in 2005 some unfortunate soul had a book out just a week or two before, a thriller that depicted a very similar event, bombs and all.

I remember someone saying to me at the time, 'What timing -- that will sell loads.' No it won't, I thought. And it didn’t. There are some recent events that are just too close for comfort. Writing about terrorism in general is one thing. Imaginary terrorist attacks are fair game too -- I use one in <em>The Blue Demon.</em> But the real world is different. No one wants to read much about London getting bombed, about 9/11, Afghanistan (directly anyway) or swine flu. Escapism is a strong motive for picking up a book. Yes miserable books do sell. But normally they're miserable in themselves, not miserable about external matters we're all miserable about already.

It's certainly possible to set fiction around real-world events. But far better to make them something historic -- the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Bay of Pigs crisis, even the first Iraq war -- than something that's happening right now. And do remember that books have a long life if you're lucky. You may only be able to see them a year or two out. If they work they will be around for a lot longer than that and may get a second wind when they're republished a decade or so later. Tying them to some specific topical thread or event in the news is like dressing them in today's fashions. You guarantee that very soon they'll look jaded and out of date, of interest primarily as a curiosity.

This applies particularly to the writers of series. Time is an illusion in most fiction, and for series writers most of all <a href="http://www.davidhewson.com/2009/09/time-in-fiction-is-just-one-bi/" target="_blank">as I've discussed here</a>. If you fix some element of your story in the real world it can come back to haunt you, through picky readers or by limiting your possibilities when it comes to future stories.

I've only set one Costa book in a fixed time frame and so far I've got away with it. That was <em>The Sacred Cut</em> which, because of the nature of the story, is set at the end of the second Iraq war. I didn't have much choice given what I was writing about. But I very much doubt I'd do that again.

Books exist outside the real world, in a time all of their own. Best to leave them in that special space, not try to drag them kicking and screaming into ours.