What does it mean to “write
what you know”? Based on some of the submissions I receive, I
fear many writers are taking this common piece of writing advice
too literally.
Audrey Niffenegger has
never been a time traveler or a ghost. Robin McKinley has never met a
vampire or a dragon. Margaret Atwood has not lived through the rise of
a theocratic dictatorship or the end of human civilization.
Jonathan Lethem is not an astronaut, or as far as I know the boyfriend of
one. Shakespeare was never the king of any country, and his father
was probably not killed by his step-father. Philip Roth did not grow
up in Nazi America.
And so on and so on, and
yet, they all wrote what they knew.
It’s helpful to draw upon
your own experiences when you’re writing, but there's autobiography
and there's autobiography. I work plenty of my own experience into my
stories, but I don't get confused between myself and my characters
or insist that they act the way I did or that events happen the way they
happened to me, or even that the experiences I’m drawing on
have any obvious relationship to the ones I’m writing about. For
example, take my Alzheimer's/vampire story completely aside from the
futuristic vampire backdrop which obviously isn't autobiographical,
I'm also not a caregiver for somebody with Alzheimer's, nor a short
order cook, and never have been. But I couldn't have written as
convincingly from the point of view of a caregiver without the
experiences I've had with my maternal grandparents, as well as
family conversations about their deterioration and care
requirements, and of course a great deal of research.
Research is what allows
you to write factually about things you haven’t experienced
directly, so you can put your character in 16th century China or on the
moon and avoid anachronisms or scientific inaccuracy, so your
readers are not pulled out of the story by knowing more than you do about its
backdrop. Writing what you know, on the other hand, allows you to
give the story emotional accuracy. For example, while my facial transplantation story drew information from my
day job as the administrative assistant to several head and neck
surgeons, as well as a lot of research on PubMed, to make it
emotionally convincing I needed to draw on my own life experiences of times
I have felt socially awkward and alienated.
Think about the emotional
core of your characters’ experiences, and relate them to times in
your own life when you have experienced something sufficiently
emotionally similar that you can relate to their joy, their pain,
their fear, their whathaveyou.
If you’re having trouble
with a scene or character, break down what your character experiences
into its most basic emotional components, then think of a time in
your own life when you have felt those emotions (even if the
incident that brought them on has no relationship to what your
character is going through). Say your character has just found
out their husband is cheating on them; think of a time when you’ve been
betrayed by somebody you trusted. Say your character is an assassin sent
to kill an old flame; think of a time in your life when your duty
has conflicted with your desires. Say your character is facing seemingly insurmountable odds in a battle for the future of the human race;
take a time when you’ve faced something difficult and expand on
those feelings.
Writing what you know
provides the basis for fiction that feels true to the reader. It means
mining your past (especially the weird and painful parts) and, to
torture this metaphor a little, smelting your experiences into stories
that shine with authenticity.
Joanne Merriam is a Nova Scotian living in Nashville. She is
the author of the poetry collection The Glaze from Breaking, several short stories, and several unpublished novels, and
is the editor Upper Rubber Boot Books.
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