How to write: advice from Morris Lurie

Some years ago I had the good fortune of having a one on one session about writing with the distinguished Australian Jewish writer, Morris Lurie. I was attending a seminar on Jewish culture or that sort of thing in Hamilton, and Morris Lurie was one of the guest speakers. When I turned up at his talk I was the only one there, so we chatted about writing. If Morris Lurie is remembered at all, he is remembered for the hilarious children's book, The twenty-seventh Annual African Hippopotamus race. He was a serious, thoughtful writer, won the 2006 Patrick White award for authors whose work had gone under-recognized. It is perhaps sad that someone who wrote a number of serious books is only remembered for a slight, short children's story. But such is the fate of authors. He and I discussed the stories of a great Irish short story writer. I thought that these stories were smoothly, fluently written, but Morris Lurie rubbished them. They were not true. A work of fictions may not be true in the sense that it is made up by the author, not based on hard facts, but it should be true in the sense that it is consistent, there is nothing in it that is contrived, artificial, inconsistent. I read some, if by no means all the short stories in the New Yorker as they arrive, and have recently read short stories by a well known local author, and I keep being bothered by the notion that these are not true, they are contrived, odd things happen that do not follow from what we know about the characters or circumstances. People just don't do that, don't behave like that, the actions don't ring true. I have just abandoned a novel by a very well known successful British writer, because he imposed a false story on a setting, characters, circumstances that just were not believable. The dialogue was not right for the people concerned, not right for the period and not right for the place. I have the words of Morris Lurie in my mind whenever I write, which is seldom these days, but perhaps will happen again tomorrow or the day after. It is a yardstick I try to measure my stories by, and if they fail the test, as most of my writing did, I have to leave them or come back to them until I hope that I get it right. Morris Lurie died a year ago, at the age of 75.