Here’s a wonderful myth, one you’ll hear retold from writing class to university up and down the land: ‘Write about what you know.’

I almost fall off my chair laughing typing those words. Shakespeare never set foot in Denmark but he wrote Hamlet. He almost certainly never visited Italy, yet he wrote Othello, The Merchant of Venice, Romeo and Juliet, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Julius Caesar, and scattered Italian references throughout his work. Was he crippled by his ignorance? You tell me.

Writing about what you know may work for some people. For a lot of us it doesn’t, and here’s the reason: we take for granted what we know. We don’t see the uniqueness in what lies around us all the time. If we try to turn that world into fiction we may drain it of colour and life because it’s so familiar we scarcely notice those essential, vivid details that an outsider would immediately seize upon.

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 and violent scene that . . . died on the page. I couldn’t quite believe it. Everything that went before worked. What should have been the denouement was written with all the verve of a business report.

I asked, ‘What happened here?’

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

Boring, in other words. To her anyway. She’d written the familiar part with her eyes shut, and the strangeness she’d invented with them wide open.

The outsider’s gaze is a tremendous creative tool. I’ve written books set in Rome, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Venice — cities I love but do not live in. That semi-informed passion, that hunger to get things right, to see the city freshly each time, has always served me better than the insider’s weary familiarity. When I walk around Rome preparing a book I notice everything. A Roman walking the same streets notices nothing, because why would they? It’s just Tuesday.

Write about what fascinates you. The research will follow. The knowledge will come. The freshness — that’s already there.