Write What You Know

In an English class I was once in the students were instructed to write a list of what they knew about and what they wanted to know more about. Any common items between the two were good candidates for essay topics. This led to that teacher reading a lot of persuasive essays about some controversial football injury. It kind of served her right.

The mantra "write what you know" is common, and my experience in that class was not my first grapple with it.

When I was twelve, I started my first novel. It was about a princess who acted as a messenger for the king, secretly relaying a warning of impending war to their allies. It was flawed, but I worked hard at it. Well, early in the process, I read a book about writing which spoke forcefully on the virtues of writing only what you know. I was crushed. I thought I'd broken a heretofore unmentioned eleventh commandment. I wasn't a princess, I didn't ride horses daily, I hate sleeping outdoors, and I couldn't fight. How dare I write about those things!

Of course, I came to my senses and realized the author of that bit of advice probably didn't mean it quite so literally, but if he did then I certainly had every right to ignore him. I grew up reading fantasy and if they were wrong, I had no desire to be right.

I saw the point brought up again recently over whether writers should include minority characters if they themselves are not a member of that minority. Those who said no mainly objected on the grounds of not wanting to offend through ignorance. Those who said yes felt that creating dialogue about minority issues is what's important, and while they acknowledged that mistakes could be made even mistakes create dialogue.

Personally, I came down on the side of saying you should write about minorities even if you are not a member of that minority. Everyone is in a minority about something. Color of skin, religion, politics, favorite tv show, something sets everyone apart and makes them feel on the outside of the crowd. I posit that including minority characters isn't about what makes him or her different and how that makes other people treat them, but about how being different makes that character feel and act.

For example, I have never been discriminated against at a job because of my race, but I have because of my age. I started working a job that I was knowledgeable about when I was fifteen years old, but the clientele were almost all old enough to be my grandmother. There were customers who would come in looking for help which I could provide them, but because of my age they would dismiss my advice. It made me feel ashamed and angry and so very frustrated. I knew I couldn't change their minds about me without changing their perception of me first, so that's what I did. I stopped dressing in t-shirts with funny graphics and started wearing career blouses. I stopped wearing light wash jeans and shorts and started wearing dark wash jeans and skirts. I started wearing makeup all the time and fixing my hair in something other than ponytails and braids. I worked even harder to learn more about my job than anyone and I went in every morning with a chip on my shoulder. After that, I developed a whole group of customers who would come in and ask for me if they needed help. I was thrilled, but inside I was resentful that I had to work harder than everyone else to earn a bit of respect.

That's what minorities and discrimination are about, and everyone has something that has made them feel that way. If they don't, just wait. It will happen.

There are two very different and equally appropriate ways to interpret "Write What You Know," but they are meant for two separate situations. The first is the one the English teacher with the lists was demonstrating. It's for non-fiction, essays and the like, where you must write only what you can empirically know. The other is meant for fiction and what it means isn't well described in that four word mantra. A better way to put it is "Write Feelings You Know."

The fiction interpretation took me the longest to figure out, but it's simple enough. It's all about the characters. If there was ever any one thing a fiction writer needed to know it's that the only things in a story that matter are characters. If you don't know your characters, you don't know anything. 

Say you have a character that's a bomber. Well, researching how to build a bomb might get you put on the no-fly list, and luck for the fiction writer, you don't need to no much more about bomb building than you can learn by watching an action flick. What's important about your character being a bomber is not what chemicals he uses but why he builds the bombs and how he chooses who to use them against. The motivation of an action, not the execution, is what is essential to a story.

Every experience I have had informs my writing, because it informs my characters. Like it or not, writers use themselves and the people they've known to create the experiences they write down on paper. A character isn't a carbon copy of one person. Not all writers run around writing down snippets of overheard conversation to use later. (Though some do.) However, what a writer observes and experiences influences how they make a character react, and how characters react is what develops plot.

Later,

Emily