Our world, more than at any time in history, is all about stories. Snapchat feeds capture your entire day, Instagram users meticulously curate their pages and stories, and detailed Twitter threads recount what happened on the morning commute. We are storytellers, narrators, transmitters of tales – occasionally those of others but mostly our own. We’ve been assured we all have a story and what we need is the courage and space to tell it. But these days it’s not enough just to have an experience, or even just to share it. People feel compelled to claim stories, to plant a flag and proclaim: “This is mine.” Instinctively, some people privilege their own experience over any other; that their story is always the “authentic” one.

When that story is rooted in trauma, a whole host of ethical implications suddenly come into play. How do we tell the story of such experiences? Why should we? To what extent does it desensitise the audience to future stories? And perhaps the most pertinent question, at least in this Era of Authenticity, is: who gets to tell it?

Enter My Dark Vanessa. Kate Elizabeth Russell’s debut, for which she reportedly received a seven-figure advance, is one of the most hyped books of 2020. (These two points are not unrelated.) The novel opens in 2017 when, at the height of the #MeToo movement, Vanessa learns that her former English teacher – with whom she had a relationship in high school – has been accused of sexual assault by a former student. The allegations cause her to re-evaluate her own past with him.

At the start of the year (and hot on the heels of another controversy concerning a much-hyped book with a big deal behind it), Latinx author Wendy C Ortiz wrote that the premise and marketing for My Dark Vanessa was “eerily” similar to that of her 2014 memoir Excavation, about her teenage sexual experiences with an English teacher. The Twitter mob kicked into high gear, levelling plagiarism charges at Russell and accusing her of being another white author co-opting and profiting from the experiences of marginalised communities. In a January essay, Ortiz shared that Russell had told her she’d read Excavation – alongside other material (naturally) in the 20 years she spent writing My Dark Vanessa.

The cover of Excavation by Wendy C Ortiz, who says she was told it would be difficult to market to a wide readership.

Although Ortiz is careful not to use the P-word, she questions Russell’s rationale in writing a novel about sexual abuse, and for “mining books that deal with the subject” in order to write it. Her use of the words “fictionalise” and “sensationalise” are worth noting as they seem to imply, in the case of the former, that a white woman cannot experience that kind of trauma, and in the case of the latter, that a novel is not an appropriate way to relate such an experience. When people began demanding that Russell prove she lived through the experience her novel represents (one shudders to think what such evidence might consist of), Russell revealed that My Dark Vanessa is based on experiences she had as a teenager. “I do not believe that we should compel victims to share the details of their personal trauma with the public,” she wrote in a short statement, sharing her fear that “opening up further about my past would invite inquiry that could be re-traumatising”.

Here we come to the crux of the matter. It’s bad enough that people now feel comfortable telling novelists what they can and can’t write about, but this controversy brings to the fore something more disturbing – the notion that you must have lived trauma in order to write about it, and that there’s only one way of narrating it, namely through some autobiographical medium. Is it inconceivable that a person might choose to articulate their experience from behind the veneer of safety that fiction provides?

Whether it’s to afford themselves some distance from a traumatic memory or to avoid reactions from loved ones (writers may have friends and family they do not wish to disclose such experiences to), fiction offers space to explore and work through sensitive, complex topics. Do we really want to get into a position of dictating how someone should write about such experiences?

That a writer could have experienced the trauma their novel narrates has long been assumed, but demand to prove it feels new

Aspiring novelists are frequently given the oft-misunderstood directive to “write what you know”, and there’s a long history of debut novels by women being seen as thinly veiled autobiography; my own debut, which deals with the unacknowledged trauma of a young woman, was treated the same way. That a fiction writer could have experienced the trauma their novel narrates has long been assumed by the public, critics and academics, but this demand that a novelist prove such a thing feels new and more-than-a-little alarming.

Whether or not Ortiz believes that Russell’s note regarding her own experiences is, like her admitting to reading Excavation, “a little too late”, when she says she has no interest in a fictionalised account of something she lived through, I understand her grievance. It goes back to ownership of an experience and strikes at the heart of the ethics of trauma representation. When you’ve survived something monstrous, attempts by others to create art from it can seem offensive, as though it diminishes the singularity of your experience – particularly if you think your own story has been overlooked.

Another dimension to this is that we read novels and watch films and look at art because we derive some pleasure from them. When that pleasure is built on someone’s very real pain, it produces a profoundly uncomfortable tension. The question, though, is where do we draw the line? Can you only write about war if you’ve lived through it? What about cancer? Addiction? Mental health? Domestic violence? Do you have to produce evidence of your own personal experience with such trauma in order to fictionalise it?

The last couple of years have seen a necessary call for #OwnVoices across the writing community, a desire to amplify the voices of marginalised authors. However, this has become conflated with an #OwnStories argument, which is not the same thing and is not necessarily the role of fiction. We have life-writing for that, and we cannot allow ourselves to normalise the policing of novelists.

There’s a wider issue that cannot be divorced from these controversies, one Ortiz emphasises in her essay: the ramifications of an overwhelmingly white publishing industry: 89% of workers in the UK and 76% in the US publishing field identify as white. There are many implications to this, one of which is that the industry is geared towards white readers. When editors told Ortiz it would be too difficult to market Excavation to a wide readership, she was right in understanding that to mean a “white” one. With the market oriented in such a way, publishers ask themselves two questions: what does the reader expect from a book by a Latinx or Arab or black (or whatever) writer, and does this book meet that expectation? If the answer to the second question is “no”, then it’s unlikely the publisher is going to risk it – let alone shell out a seven-figure advance and roll out the hype machine for it. Instead of asking why someone would write a novel about sexual abuse, a better question is: why does the industry think it can’t sell a memoir from a Latinx writer about this issue? What do they believe readers expect from such a memoir, and why are they unwilling to challenge those assumptions?

A more diverse industry would mean a copy editor could point out that the Spanish in the text is not quite right for where the story is set. It would mean a cover designer who wouldn’t immediately be drawn to the most stereotypical motifs. It would mean a commissioning editor or a publicist who is embedded in marginalised cultural and artistic outlets. A more inclusive field would mean more diverse books catering to a more nuanced and diverse audience. It would mean publishers willing to throw their weight behind riskier books. Until the industry starts to view diversity as more than a box-ticking exercise, we’re destined to see more controversies about who gets to write what and how.

• The Pact We Made by Layla AlAmmar is published by Borough (£8.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.