Imagination is Not Enough: Why Fiction Needs Fieldwork

When I began reading fiction in middle school, I had a naïve and romantic idea of writing. I imagined writers isolating themselves on a mountain or sitting by the sea, at a well-lit desk, inventing worlds out of nothing and/or writing about their personal lives. My first short story at age fourteen was written exactly in that spirit: I locked myself for two weeks in our country house in the mountains of Tizi Ouzou (Algeria) during spring break. I believed that silence, solitude, and a spark of inspiration were enough.

But in high school in Algiers, that vision collapsed. Our teacher of French had us read Germinal and then Madame Bovary. Germinal was a revelation: I understood that Émile Zola had written the novel as part of a vast project, the Rougon-Macquart, a twenty-novel cycle (1871-1893) that traces the lives of two families during the Second French Empire, using fiction as a laboratory to study and narrate major social forces—industrialization, alcoholism, prostitution, class conflict, and the structural transformations of French society. Zola showed an extraordinary commitment to research. My teacher emphasized a detail I never forgot: Zola descending into the mines, taking notes, living among the miners. Gustave Flaubert was no different: Madame Bovary was born from two real stories in Rouen and from an impressive mountain of notes.

Just as a historian needs solid sources, testimonies, and documents, fiction requires a living, complex, layered substance.

It was then that I understood: writing is not only imagination; writing is investigation, immersion, observation.

From that moment on, one principle has never left me: to write a good novel, you need good material. Just as a historian needs solid sources, testimonies, and documents, fiction requires a living, complex, layered substance. Imagination alone is not enough.

When I started writing my own novels, I trusted this instinct. All my books are rooted in lived experience, personal research, and direct engagement with the places, people, and conflicts I wanted to depict. Clash of Civilizations over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio is not only set in that Roman neighborhood; it is the result of years of living in Piazza Vittorio, working with migrants and refugees, and observing tensions and stories firsthand. Of course, I used my personal life as a refugee in Italy for nine years.

In 2006, after the unexpected success of my first Italian novel, I found myself in difficulty: major publishers were approaching me with generous offers, and I feared the trap of the “second book.” It was a writer’s festival in Modica, Sicily, that unexpectedly saved me. During a presentation, a woman from the audience asked about my relationship with other writers. I answered honestly: yes, we are cordial, but I avoid spending too much time around fellow writers. I prefer artisans, people whose work is different from mine; from them I can learn. Among writers, there is always a risk of mutual imitation, conscious or not.

At the end of the event, a kind and elegant gentleman approached me. He introduced himself as one of Modica’s master chocolatiers, Franco Ruta of Antica Dolceria Bonajuto. He invited me to spend a day with him in his workshop. It was revelatory: he showed me every step of chocolate production, introduced me to machines and techniques, and let me taste a different chocolate. At the end, he said something I have never forgotten: “I can have the best machines in the world, the most skilled artisans, the most sophisticated marketing, but if I don’t have the raw material, I cannot make good chocolate. That’s why I go every year to the Ivory Coast to follow the plantations.”

In that moment, I understood that the same rule applies to fiction: without strong, authentic material, no good novel can be written.

That realization led me to transform my doctoral dissertation on Muslim migrants in Italy from an academic book into a bilingual novel titled Divorce Islamic Style, published in Arabic and Italian. Had I published the dissertation, it would likely have remained within a narrow scholarly niche; the novel, instead, has been translated into four languages: English, French, German, and Japanese.

In 2014, I left Italy and moved to the United States with my wife Stephanie Love, who is now a linguistic anthropologist at the University of Pittsburgh. There I fell into an identity and literary crisis: Italy felt distant; America was too new to write about. I realized that for twenty years, I had kept myself away from Algeria, the country I had left in 1995. It was time to confront the ghosts, to face the past directly. I began to imagine a trilogy spanning sixty years of Algerian history, starting with The Fertility of Evil.

Using high-quality material is essential for strong writing in any genre. Without research and fieldwork, fiction can fall apart like sugar in the sun.

To build it, I returned to research: I reread historical texts, testimonies, archives; I searched for forgotten materials. Then, in 2018, my wife and I returned to Algeria—she for her research on the postcolonial Algeria, and I to gather the voices, spaces, and gestures that would become my narrative material. For eighteen months, we conducted fieldwork together: I worked as an interpreter and local informant, but I was also listening and observing her and the reality. Her questions, her anthropological gaze, opened new perspectives for me, pushing me to investigate aspects of Algeria I might never have seen on my own. She is an extraordinary mirror.

She eventually completed her dissertation, published articles, and is now finishing her book with the University of Chicago Press. I transformed that period into fiction. It was an ideal collaboration: gathering material together, then each following our own path—she toward non-fiction, I toward the novel.

This method has changed my life as a writer and renewed my creative energy. Fiction, when born from robust, lived, and interrogated material, can cross borders, languages, and eras. That is why we plan to continue working in this way: conducting fieldwork together, collecting data, listening to stories, witnessing the transformation of places, and then each shaping that material through our own voice.

Using high-quality material is essential for strong writing in any genre. Without research and fieldwork, fiction can fall apart like sugar in the sun.

__________________________________

The Fertility of Evil by Amara Lakhous, translated by Alexander E. Elinson, is available from Other Press.