Write what you ... NO!

How many times have we heard the echo of Hemingway’s voice in classrooms and workshops across America? “Write what you know. Write what you know!” It can be discouraging to be told that you can’t write what you don’t know, especially by a professor who looks as if he might fart Precambrian fossil-dust when he’s not busy telling kids not to exercise their imaginations. Worse still is being told this same thing by droves of pastoral writers whose only means of expression seems to be found in the dry, meandering, agrarian prose depicting the everyday lives most people are trying to escape when they bury their nose in a book.

At first glance it seems 'write what you know' is telling us to use our life experiences to navigate our stories. Hemingway (yes, Hemingway again, sorry folks, I have a thing for disgruntled, prideful, bearded suicides) was in the the Red Cross during WWI, then went on to write A Farewell to Arms in his future. His stories were autobiographical snapshots from days as an Ambulance Driver on the Italian front, or transplant Parisian, or all-around dypsomaniacal misadventurer. He was a sailor (The Old Man and the Sea), a hunter (The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber), and an avid admirer of bullfighting (The Sun also Rises).  

“Write what you know,” worked well for the itinerant intellectual … until he shot himself.  

But what about the Metropolis junkie? The backwood bookworm? The wandering artist on a budget, or worse (better, I mean ... yes, better), wordsmiths with responsibilities like a family or a job?

It's simple:

Stretch each word of that sentence (write what you know) until it’s long and flexible enough to use as a bungee jump. You dig? Writing is all about opening your mind, and making the reader  open their’s right along with you, even as you plunge them into a realm of make-believe. But just how is this achieved? Especially when you’re a day clerk at an office supplies store with visions of the next great spy novel?

Two things:

1.       Get out of your way.

2.       Study your humanity.

Opening the artistic mind has more to do with clearing out the you, than anything else. I'm one of those impoverished new-agers that believe in Divine Current, the universal flow and inalienable connectedness between all things. The writer is a conduit, and the larger his/her circumference, the steadier the flow. Sorry guys. Size matters. And the pathway to a larger, cleaner pipeline comes in the form of self-forgetting. We’re in front of our laptop to promote the story, not the storyteller. Let the characters tell us where they want to go, and who they want to be. Stop smothering them.

Which brings me to number two (a code-word for pooping): Humanity (also a code-word for pooping).

Studying humanity starts with memory. How could you forget the shock of being at the fair with your parents, only to lose them in the crowd? The nervous tension of sitting next to a girl on your friend’s couch, and slowly inching your arm around her shoulders. The dopamine high of a first kiss, and the rectal-genital throb of shock when a friend mentions that she likes someone else. The uncontrollable laughter at witnessing the absurd. These are things we know. Things we can use to enliven a story with humanity. Make your characters real. Give them dimensions, fears, memories, losses, triumphs. Carve from a blank page some semblance of life, some vivid mimicry with which to lull the masses through each page.

This is especially true for the sci-fi, horror, or fantasy writer, whose premises often demand a sizable reservoir of verisimilitude in his/her cabinet of writing tools. Verisimilitude—the quality of truth, or resembling truth—is established by emotional realism; by including characters with desires, and fears, and old wounds they still hide from their enemies, introverts too afraid to bare themselves for fear of judgment, and extroverts so dedicated to enjoying themselves that they do so at the expense of others. Straight arrows who were taught to do the right thing even when it hurt, and entrepreneurs who've seen what an occasional kink in the moral tight-rope can do for a long-term gain. People so in need of love that they’ll punish themselves to procure it. The list of character’s goes on and on. We meet them every day. We fantasize over, and resent, and even fear them.

These ghosts, these snapshots of humanity, are the ingredients needed to WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW. Whether our setting is in Vietnam circa 1965, ninth-century Visagothic Spain, or Hexel9z of the Plexar solar system, we can take those colors of humanity, and use them to make the reader believe.

So go forth, my lovelies. Sit down, boot up, and move your ego out of the picture. Your unmade world has something to say.