The American novelist and short story writer Flannery O'Connor once said, "If you're going to write, you'd better come from somewhere," perhaps because good writing, like good wine, does have a sense of terroir - landscape, climate, derivation. The Irishness of writers such as James Joyce, Yeats and more recently John McGahern somehow seems to be mystically ingrained in their work.
However, even if you don't have the good fortune to come from a place that has a recognised literary hallmark stamped on it, you can always come from somewhere in a metaphorical sense. Don't limit yourself to the geography of your origins, think about where you have come from in an emotional sense, in terms of your personal experience, and see how this can inform your writing. My hunch is that Flannery O'Connor , in saying that writers need to come from somewhere, might have meant that they need to arrive at the blank page in front of them with something pressing to say about where they have been, rather than where they were born, with a good story to unpack from their travelling bag.
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