One of the proverbs in writing classes, text books, etc. is "write what you know". If you were in Vietnam, a la Robert Olen Butler or Tim O'Brien, hey dude, write about Vietnam!!! This proverb, while containing some truth, has always annoyed me for a few reasons:
1) As a fiction writer, I feel everyone who writes fiction should feel free to make shit up. If I, a 27 year old white American male, choose to write a story about a 62 yr old Jamaican transvestite, I should feel quite free to do so without someone coming up to me someday and saying, "Hey man, you're not from Jamaica."
2)If everyone wrote what they knew, science fiction, fantasy, and letters to Penthouse wouldn't even exist.
3)Writers have enough problems without worrying about "living their fiction". And it hinders the imagination, which is why we have so many fucking books about college English professors sleeping, or dreaming about sleeping, with their students.
4) Of course, you could read into the proverb at a much higher level, which would mean "writing what you know" as in writing about the pain, love, rage, etc. you've felt as a human being yourself and weaving it into fiction. Unfortunately, this often leads to memoirs.
5) I personally don't really feel like I know a hell of a lot, and most writing written by writers who know, or think they know, a hell of a lot is painful, a la Rushdie. I actually write to find out stuff, not because I fucking know it all. Writing for me is like hacking through a philosophic jungle for a year or two and hoping you find the clearing, and that once you get to the clearing there's some sense that it was worth all that effort.
And tonight, I finally found some backup to my opinions:
The old nut goes, write what you know, but often a writer is clearer about what she doesn't know and must learn about. One gets all too easily lost in oneself. The detached concentration that research demanded may have helped Fitzgerald see Gatsby more clearly.
Susan Bell, THE ARTFUL EDIT
Now, if only I liked research.
Blogagaard Loves to Ponder
About Me
- David Oppegaard
- St. Paul, Minnesota
- I am the author of And the Hills Opened Up, The Suicide Collectors, and Wormwood, Nevada.
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4 comments:
Sorry about the memoir crack, if you're writing a memoir. We here at Blogagaard couldn't resist.
As a writer of speculative fiction, I agree it's hard to write what you know when you spend much of your time making up stuff.
I've always applied "write what you know" to the little bits of my fiction that I may have experienced in my life. I've never commanded a starship before, but I have served in the military and I do have some experience in wearing a uniform and performing a duty.
In every piece of writing I do, there is some little kernel of what I know inside of it, something that I've experienced worked into the prose to keep it real. The longer you live, presumably the more of these little nuggets of life experience can be sprinkled in to your writing.
It also pays to read _a_lot_ and to write _a_lot_, to know what has gone before you and to earn your stripes as a writer by actually practicing the craft.
p.s. Happy belated birthday!
Rushdie is hard to read but he is a clever and entertaining man to hear speak! Plus he has a smart and hot soon-to-be-ex-wife: http://www.lakshmifilms.com/index.html
Write whatever you want! I would love to read it.
Thanks Ken. I guess were bound to write what we know no matter what, including applied knowledge from what we've read and experienced, and I guess what annoys me is the strong literal application of the proverb.
I think it's funny how Rushdie and Bono are such good friends. Heh heh. Bono.
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