[Perry] Write What You Know
As a writer, I know there are times when you’re sitting there staring at a blank document. You’ve tried to get what’s in your head out onto the page but it’s just refusing to come out quite right.
I know that there are times when you’re editing one of your pieces and you cringe at how contrived some of your plot elements seem to be.
I know there are times when your character dialogue sounds wooden and hollow and no amount of thesaurus-ing can liven it up.
For those times, I will say to you the following words.
Write what you know.
It’d advice that I picked up from a turn of the century writer, Jack London. In his semi-autobiographical Martin Eden, the protagonist bemoans the fact that everything he tries to write sounds hollow and contrived, whereupon he yells at himself. Telling himself that he can’t hope to capture nature and the world with his pen if all he’s ever known is the city he grew up in; the tiniest corner of the world.
London followed that advice. He went out to become an oyster pirate. He voyaged to Japan on a sealing expedition and he went up north to the Klondike during the great gold rush.
When he writes of these things, there is a power and resonance to his words. His words become real in a way that can’t be imitated off the cuff.
But this is a pretty vague example, isn’t it?
Let’s bring this a little closer to home.
That’s a scene near the beginning of a game called Heavy Rain. And from watching it, I’m 100% sure that SOMEONE on the team that designed that scene lost their child at the mall. Someone on the design team has experienced that panic.
Someone on that design team has woken in the middle of the night in a cold sweat as their mind played out the event to a nightmarish conclusion.
I have friends with children who have a hard time watching that scene, even if it’s just from a game. It’s just too damned real, everything from the slight accusation in the wife’s voice to the rising panic of the father as he desperately mistakes a random child as his son.
Now I’m not saying that you need to go out and lose your kid in a mall,go out on a seal-hunting expedition, or only write about the everyday world to write well, but by injecting various facets of your own personal life experience into your writing, you can fake that sense of authenticity.
Maybe you narrowly avoided a car accident on the way to work today. Do you remember the sudden adrenaline dump? The way your hands trembled with the aftershock? How about the mix of heady relief and irrational fury?
Channel that! Have a character narrowly avoiding being shot in Victorian England or have them narrowly avoid being mauled by a Jovian dragon while sailing the storms of Jupiter.
Maybe one of your friends have a very distinctive way of speaking? Have one of your characters utilize that same mannerism, whether they’re a teenage werewolf with a lisp or an alien life form from another dimension that talks like he’s from the ghetto because that’s how it learned the language.
You don’t have to write events or people in your life exactly as they occur, but by poaching some of those elements and slipping them into your writing, you might find that your story gains a degree of realism that may otherwise be lacking.
15 Comments
Yes! The advice doesn’t mean “ONLY write what you know” — it means to take what you know and develop your writing from that.
Not many people KNOW what it’s like to ride a dragon into battle, and yet Novak and McCaffrey did a pretty good job of making us feel like we got to do it.
One big thing, though? Don’t write some of the bigger things, like grief, if you’ve never felt it yourself. Rape is another that if you don’t understand it (not necessarily experienced, but UNDERSTAND), you should just stay away from.
There are most definitely certain topics that are nearly impossible to cover well without having experienced it yourself.
Though some people…some folks tap into it pretty well.
In Stephen King’s recent short story collection, Full Dark, No Stars, he covers an incident of rape in one of his stories that just…chilled me right down to the bone.
So I definitely believe it’s doable but as you suggested, you need to have a little bit of insight into it before you can make it happen, much more so than just blue-skying it at your desk.
Seriously! I found it interesting to compare two “rape revenge” stories: King’s “Big Driver” and Stieg Larsson’s “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.”
Larsson’s movie didn’t work for me. I knew nothing about the author, however I told my husband, “This was written by a man. I give him high marks, because he’s obviously trying to understand what it would be like to be raped. But he doesn’t quite get it.” King’s story was the first one I’ve ever read where I thought, “You get it. You really, really get it.” He hit it on the head.
For me, two points “gave away” Larsson’s gender and lack of first-hand experience.
1) He missed the horror of the crime. For Larsson, rape is a terrible, monstrous crime. King, however, knew it was worse: it’s a crime where the victim is often blamed for their own abuse. Larsson’s heroine doesn’t appear to feel tainted or unclean. Her reaction is a pure, “clean” rage. It’s the reaction a man would feel if he was raped. King understood how societal prejudice can make a woman doubt herself, fear going to the authorities for help. The way that it eats at your soul as you wonder if this is somehow your fault. You wore the ‘wrong’ clothes. You were ‘too friendly.’ You didn’t take ‘sufficient’ safety precautions.
2) The revenge. King’s heroine does something terrible to her rapist, but it’s something I can see a woman doing. Larsson’s heroine’s reaction (to me) was, “Oh you’re gonna rape me, huh? Well I’ll RAPE YOU RIGHT BACK IN THE FACE, BUDDY!” Her reaction baffled me. I can’t swear that no woman has ever gotten so mad that she wanted to rape someone. But rape is so biologically implausible for us, so outside our cultural norms that the scene broke my suspension of disbelief. It seemed like a (feminist) man’s reaction to a hideous crime.
I’m so glad that you’re taking the time to express your thoughts, Jenny!
A bunch of the things you’re bringing up has me sitting bolt upright going, “THAT!! That’s exactly it!” haha.
Something about the Dragon Tattoo movie (didn’t read the book) bugged me with regard to the rape scene and subsequent revenge but I couldn’t put my finger on it.
But you completely nailed it.
Your note about how the girl experiences a ‘clean’ rage is completely spot on and thinking about it now, my reaction to seeing the guy getting what’s coming to him was more of a…like…watching another guy getting nailed in the balls instead of the violation that it probably SHOULD have been.
While there was a decent amount of audience cheer-worthy moments in the vengeance, there was never any real sense that she felt violated by the crime. Just plain angry.
Whereas with the King story…I finished reading that and wanted to take a hot shower, no joke. Just the way he set it up and the way he wrote it…completely made me feel like not only had he gotten into the woman’s head, he’d installed a window and was showing me what was going on inside while it was happening.
I had a similar reaction, but, as I recall, Lisbeth had some metal issues that made her more emotionally distant as well. The “clean rage” may make more sense from that angle. I feel like I should watch it again now (maybe in english this time).
And here I was about to bring up “Carrie”.
I agree with your advice, though I think it raises a tangled question.
Are race and gender ‘bigger things’?
Gender is almost unavoidable. Very few books can be set in a single-sex ‘world.’ Yet I think it’s one of the great pitfalls of writing. Abject sexism is (fortunately) less common than it was when I was young. But many books I read have cross-gender characters who are flat, two-dimensional, dull, unbelievable. As a writer, I found it helpful to ask a man to read my manuscript looking specifically at gender issues. Are my boys acting like boys? As an only-child and childless (female) adult, adolescent boys are NOT my area of expertise.
Race, however, is a thornier issue. The trick with race and sexual orientation is that, unlike gender, you can choose to leave them out of your book. I’ve read lots of complaints about how racist this is, how there are too few minority protagonists in fantasy and science fiction. On the other hand, one of my friends got slammed for writing a Hispanic heroine who ‘wasn’t Hispanic enough’ for some people.
So what’s better? Sticking to what you know — or trying to write about people very different from you? I don’t have a good answer.
Same for sexual orientation, but honestly? I’d err on the side of safety.
If you do not think you can write a believable Latina or gay man … don’t. Better, I think, than to write a caricature that truly DOES offend.
Yeah…I’d go for that too.
Thing is, a part of me wants to completely encourage experimentation. You know, get out there and write something you never thought you’d have in you. Until you actually TRY it, you’ll never know if have it in you to write a fantastic lesbian, Mongolian protagonist.
If you DO try something like that though, I’d be careful who you share it with. While you may not intend to offend (naturally), some people are just a lot more sensitive than others.
I really LOVE your advice up there though, about having someone of the…uh, ‘persuasion’? that you’re trying to write read over your work with a specific eye toward gender/racial bias.
That seems like a fantastic idea and one that I intend to start using as soon as possible =)
I have a distant friend who writes slash, and we have a mutual (gay) friend she asks to vet her writing. He finds it funny and somewhat flattering. Oddly, I know people who think it’s awful. Another friend considered it hideously insulting and insisted that the slash writer ought to stick to what she knew. My gay friend disagreed. “She wants to write about someone like me, and she wants to get it right,” he said. “How can I be insulted by that?”
The bottom line is, you’re right: some people are more sensitive than others. Best to accept that you’re not going to please everyone.
There is nothing wrong with writing something you may not be fully familiar with, so long as you don’t go around, touting it as a be-all, end-all, definitively accurate report on the topic.
I mean…so long as you’re not preaching hate, I can’t imagine it mattering that much. And if someone reads it who’s sensitive enough to take it as a personal attack, well, I’d wager they’re apt to be frustrated and enraged by a lot of perceived insults to their lifestyle, not just your/our writing in particular =(
I think you can do both simultaneously so long as you don’t turn the character into a caricature and you don’t try to kill the differences that those things bring. If either one of those things happen, forget about offending people, the writing itself likely has a problem. Even people that highly identify with their race, gender, and/or sexual orientation aren’t really flat (though it might be hard not to write them that way).
Beyond that, people that critique you for not meeting the caricature are just being racist/sexist/homocentric themselves (“What do you mean no X would do that? Do all X’s think alike?”).
I would experiment and I would ask why it matters. If it’s just a minor description piece because you always imagined them with brown or white skin or you’re making the protagonist gay just because you can, then it really doesn’t matter and you can probably gloss most of those things as long as you get the character right for what your story needs. It’s like J.K. Rowling saying that Dumbledore was gay. Interesting fact, maybe, but it had no impact on the story. If you’re writing “Happy, Texas”, on the other hand, sexuality is important (or as important as some goofy comedy would make it anyway).
Heh, the fact that being accused of meeting OR not meeting a perceived stereotype is a two-way street is a great point.
Knowing that hasn’t relaxed me completely (as well it shouldn’t), but it does help a lot to keep in mind in the face of some of our strongest or most vocal detractors.
Damn, but I missed a lot while I was gone! This is a general comment about the posts—Tami’s AND Perry’s—that have appeared here the past 3 weeks or so: GREAT STUFF.
I love the dialogue that has developed, and I’m really enjoying Jenny’s contributions (welcome, Jenny!), as well as those from the “older regulars.” While I don’t have anything to contribute to the present discussion other than vigorous head nods of approval and agreement, I do want to say this is “great stuff!”
^ QFT
*clinks glass*