Stabo Mowie Po Polsku.

It’s damn cold outside.

Cold enough to make your testicles shrivel as you walk, your lips crack when you smile and frost forms in your hair instantly.

Still, I suppose I am in Poland and big over-ear hats and knee high sturdy boots remain one of the stereotypes that haunts the former Eastern block countries for a very good reason.

I’m writing this having just devoured a rather large mushroom pancake which cost a rather surprising £2.50. Eastern Europe doesn’t seem as ludicrously cheap as it did nine years ago when we sat in Prague sucking bottles of Budvar for about 12p each. Today it’s almost as though two Polands exist simultaneously side by side. As though a Western tourist can reach out and touch a wall that feels solid and real, but if you pushed a little harder it will start to dissolve and underneath there’s something else. Layers of reality piling up on top of each other.

Old and new.

This is a country that has so many pasts. It has the history of the ancient Polish Kingdom, one of the first fully formed monarchies on the continent, it has a history of domination by either Prussia or White Russia and even briefly the French. Then there was a brief triumphant period between the wars and finally over forty years of enforced communism.

And now.

Now it’s a place where virtually everyone under thirty-five speaks English and everyone over, Russian. Where the young and the old are separated by more than just the passing of the years. A country naturally divided in half by the river Vistula and resulting in a western region buoyant on EU investment and an agricultural eastern half shackled by new trading restrictions with the Ukraine. It’s a country that wants to accelerate into the twenty-first century, but desperate not to do so at the expense of some of their hard fought identity.

In the first world it is sometimes difficult to see the differences when everywhere could be anywhere.

The café I’m indulgently taking up a table for too long, over-looks the beautiful old square of Poznan. The centre of the town for over seven hundred years, the current buildings appear to be eighteenth century town houses. Four stories tall, clad in a myriad range of stunning colours and intricate details along their roofs. At the ground floor they are illuminated by a range of neon signs. Segafredo Coffee, Coca-Cola, Heineken, Red Bull.

I come to places like this and I instinctively want to write about them. I’m swept up in their beauty, their history, the difference, the otherness. I’m interested in the ramshackle iron tram system, the brutalist 1950s soviet architecture, the remnants of different social norms and I look for a story to tell. But the thing is, I can’t. I can’t write about Poznan or Poland without dealing with everything I’ve listed above in some fashion. I cannot truly understand what is, I can only observe.

It’s all about voice. I could write a story with believable characters, with a coherent plot, with detailed references to Poland now and gone and it would (possibly) be competent enough, but it would still lack that magical sequence of letters that make the words spring out of the page and exist independently.

I’ve encountered this problem before, but I think it is only recently that I‘ve begun to recognise it. When we were in Croatia I was shocked at the number of men in their mid-thirties with missing limbs, or scars, or in wheelchairs. Survivors of the war. When we got home I tried to write a story that drew on Croatia’s history and it’s present situation of emerging from the ashes using the viewpoint of a veteran. What was I thinking? It was, of course, utter crap, and so it should have been. What right do I have to presume to understand the thoughts of a man who fought in a civil war?

In the spring I wrote a piece about Berlin, about an old man who returned to the street he grew up on for the first time since the war. Auguststrasse happens to the site of the Berlin Biennale that Beck and I had visited in 2006 and the nineteenth century architecture left to ramshackle makes it incredibly atmospheric. I really wanted to write something set on the street. The narrative takes place with the old man walking along the street reliving his youth in a series of blurred flashbacks, the present and the past overlap each other. Parts of it work. I was pretty damn pleased with the final sequence and felt that I’d written about old age and lost love and childhood memories competently, yet Auguststrasse is in the Jewish area and consequently the holocaust demanded to be included. It’s too big a thing to simply ignore and, of course, I couldn’t write about it with authority and so the whole piece fails. I tried to give the characters a strong sense of regret and I deliberately dodged the question of mass German participation, even though my character was compliant rather than active, trying to suggest that it is almost impossible for us today to truly understand what happened.

It failed because, again, who am I?

These are, it would seem, ventriloquist leaps too far for me at the moment.

Continuing with my example for a while: Yes it’s true that you don’t have to be a holocaust survivor or participant to write exceptionally well about the event. You don’t necessarily have to be Primo Levi to write something like If This Is Man or The Drowned And The Saved. Art Spiegelman’s Maus is superb, but then his parents were survivors and the work is as much about his relationship with his father as anything else. W.G Sebald was just a boy in 1945 but in both The Emigrants and Austerlitz he tackles the issue, but then he was German. Both of these writers have a way into the story, yet two generations removed, born into a non-practicing United Reformed Christian family in the West Midlands I have not.

This is, I suspect, about as an extreme an example as you can get.

Experience does not completely create voice, nor, indeed, does it allow you write stunning prose, but it does, I feel, give the words an added significance. It helps the reader to believe if they feel you know what you are writing about. Incidental details, supporting characters, there are many things that can be researched (although I would suggest more than just a quick look at wikipedia) and included, but I’m starting to feel that to truly write the central characters and themes of any work I must, at least, understand.

George Orwell lived penniless on the streets of both Paris and London almost seeking out the experience of starvation, poverty, of the underclass in contrast to his own upper-middle class childhood and his work as a policeman in Burma. He wanted to write political novels, words for all people and he instinctively knew that in order to be read by those he most wanted to reach he must experience the life for himself.

I could still, if I chose, write about Poland. I just have to write about an Englishman in Poznan for a brief visit. Alternatively I can come back and properly immerse myself in the area and the culture and I might find it coming alive for me, but maybe not.

Of course, it might be that none of this is true.

I’m told that Jim Crace just makes everything up. Every single detail, every location, everything either stems from his existing knowledge or his imagination. He’s a fiction writer so if you don’t know something why not invent. It is, partly, down to the confidence with which you put pen to paper. I only found this fact out recently and I’ve been a little concerned that I won’t be able to read his work again with the same intense pleasure it usually gives me, in the meantime you‘ll find me in the corner scribbling down every concept and emotion I think I can connect to.