Here's a wonderful myth, one you'll hear retold from writing class to university up and down the land. It's that old saw... Write About What You Know.

I almost fall off my chair laughing typing those words. Shakespeare never went to Scotland but he wrote <em>Macbeth.</em> He never set foot in Denmark but he wrote <em>Hamlet.</em> He certainly never went to Italy (no -- really) yet he wrote <em>Othello, The Merchant of Venice, Romeo and Juliet, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Julius Caesar</em> and a few other Italian-themed plays. Was he crippled by his ignorance? You tell me.

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Writing about what you know may work for some people. For lots it doesn't. A while back I was teaching at a writing school when someone showed me a wonderful opening she'd written for her book. It was atmospheric, beautifully phrased, had interesting characters and wound up with a dramatic scene that... died. I couldn’t quite believe this. Everything that went before worked fine. But what should have been the denouement was written with the verve of a business report.

I asked this budding author, 'What happened here?'

She looked at me and said, 'Oh, that's real. I do that job. I see that happen a lot. That's how it is.'

It was boring. Most of us take what we know for granted. We don't see the uniqueness in what lies around us. If we try to turn that world around us into fiction we drain it of colour and life because it's so familiar to us we scarcely notice that colour and live ourselves.

I've only ever written one book set in the UK, <em>Native Rites.</em> Everything else I've produced has been set abroad, normally in the Mediterranean. There's a reason for this. The Mediterranean is foreign. To a denizen of colder climes like me it's exotic, interesting, cryptic, a world waiting to be explored. When I decided to write the Costa books I took the plunge and moved to Rome, enrolled at a language school to study Italian, tried very hard to see the city through the eyes of a native. This was essential. Most writers, when they use foreign locations, view their stories through the eyes of a fellow countryman, a foreigner. I didn't want to do that. I wanted my characters to be, as far as I could make them, Roman through and through. (I hope I managed that to some extent -- my lovely Italian publisher Fanucci have just picked up four more Nic Costa books, taking the series to 2015 there, so perhaps I have.)

To write these books I had to build my own private Rome, stone by stone, street by street, vista by vista, in my own imagination and set that on the page. I wouldn’t have to do that if I set my book in London, a city I've known well for three decades. The foreignness of Rome and my ignorance of its true nature make the eventual story, I hope, more vivid and, yes, more 'real' than it could ever have been if I'd written about somewhere I knew intimately and could summon up without a stroke of work.

The operative word there, by the way, is 'work'. There are books that succeed on ingrained personal knowledge, some real-life situation that turns into fiction. But for the most part novels are the product of a fertile and adventurous imagination. Setting your story somewhere new, somewhere different, somewhere you have to invent for yourself, tasks your imagination with the creation of the world that will come to enthral and absorb the reader. I can't imagine doing that with the street round the corner, the place I've known for years.

Shakespeare wrote about what he knew in one respect: he knew people, their foibles, their strengths, their weaknesses and cruelty. That interior, personal knowledge is irreplaceable, something that is essential in anyone who wants to produce writing that strikes a chord with the reader. But in terms of location and plain fact familiarity all too easily breeds contempt. For me the best stories are never found at home. You have to go out and hunt them down.