write what you know
I’ve been rereading some instruction and exercises from The Making Of A Story, and this chapter, “The Splendid Gift of Not Knowing,” has been especially fruitful.
I transcribed what felt most important to me, adding some marginalia along the way.
Part 1: WRITING AS DISCOVERY
What Do You Know?
In short, write what you know is good advice. Before getting further into that argument, we get some quick reassurance:
This is not to say that you must avoid large or meaningful (to you) topics; neither should this be an admonition to limit use of the imagination or stick solely to a realistic rendering of the world—what a sad and lean literary heritage we would have if this were so! Rather, one of the first difficult lessons any writer must learn is how to trust his or her own personal insight and unique skills of observation, even when these conflict with accepted wisdom and the mass-produced images that bombard all of us daily.
Why it’s tempting to write what you don’t know, why it’s bad:
In their eagerness to transcend experiences they perceive as mundane, young writers often rush to depict exotic locales or extreme circumstances they consider more interesting and worth of treatment than their own worlds. But because they usually lack sufficient grounding on a sensory level—about the workings of a Colombian drug deal, for example or the inner life of a taxi driver or prostitute—beginning writers end up depending on stock images, characters, and situations from movies or television. The result is predictability, or lack of authenticity, or both.
What does distinguish certain writers as being above the crowd is a “unique and exact way of looking at things,” as well as a way of expressing that way of looking.
But my experiences are mundane wahh:
The kind of experience worth writing about is not necessarily a matter of what you’ve done (or had done to you), but the depth and breadth of what you’ve noticed—and your emotional response to what you’ve taken note of.
Creative Nonfiction: Making the Ordinary Extraordinary
Not much here besides an example passage, but just the heading reminded me that yes, that is one of the very fundamental things I want to do. That resonates.
Writing Down What You Don’t Know (About What You Know)
We’re interested in what we don’t know about very familiar and (to us) ordinary scenes. So just possessing knowledge about a particular topic, or place, or person isn’t going to take you very far, creatively. You won’t really claim this material, the way Sherwood Anderson claimed small town Ohio life, for instance. Not unless there are things that you don’t know about this topic, place or person, and unless you are interested to the point of obsession in finding out more.
“The pressure of emotion, which many people prefer to ignore, but which, for you, is the very substance of your work, your clay. There’s the need to make sense of life behind the impulse to write.” — Jane Kenyon
For me, this feels like very useful, practical advice for overcoming one of the challenges I face in writing about what I know. When I journal, I sometimes stick overmuch to reporting facts. Things I know. When I try to write fiction based on my life, I try to find a realization or change or meaningful event that I’ve experienced, that I already know all about.
These (understandable) approaches by definition leave out something really critical. The mystery, the thing I don’t know about, and wonder about - the thing that makes me interested in the character or the story. By trying to write about things I know (rather than what I don’t know about things I know), I cut out the thing that might make the experience in question (and the resultant piece of writing) interesting to me. And so it’s not.
This feels novel to me. I should identify things in my life that I’ve felt deeply, that have interested me, that I’ve noticed and wondered about, and write to discover more about them, to imagine more about them. That seems like such a wonderful adventure. Like fun. Like play. Rather than the much more staid misunderstanding of what writing is that the book mentioned earlier, a simple transcription of known and understood thoughts. I wanna find that passage. Ah, from “Surprise Yourself, Interest Others” - I’ll put it there.
On Rendering, Not Solving, the Mysteries That Surround Us
Without using this sense of not-knowingness, or mystery, as a starting point, anything we write will be lifeless and predictable.
Okay, you’ve identified a gap in your knowledge of a certain situation that you feel is worth explring. What then?
Here’s what not to do. Don’t try to solve these mysteries. As writers, we’re not looking to provide a lesson, or a moral; we’re not therapists looking to cure our characters of pain or neurosis. Our job, as writers, is simply to render what is using precise, concrete detail. Don’t tell us why something is, show us how it is. Don’t give us easy answers. Rather, help us understand the precise nature of the questions.
Moving from “Triggering” to Real Subject
This was a really interesting discussion for me. I was interested just from the subheading, since I often struggle with how to move from a triggering experience with a specific person or situation to a poem with a speaker who isn’t necessarily me, about something that isn’t 1:1 exactly the trigger. It feels like a lot of the poetry and other writing I enjoy isn’t that specific. Some of it is, sure, personal essay and such, but plenty of it is (or feels) elevated beyond the mundane details of the person or situation which provoked the creative act.
This section talks about that, and as part of the discussion introduces an interesting idea, which is just writing from the trigger and not thinking you know the subject of the work at the beginning, or even at the middle. Writing from the trigger, discovering the subject.
…this chapter underscores the notion that a poem is a process of discovery, not an archive of resolved emotion. Hugo has named this process of discovery as moving from the “triggering” subject to the “real” subject. Here is an excerpt from that text:
A poem can be said to have two subjects, the initiating or triggering subject, which starts the poem or “causes” the poem to be written, and the real or generated subject, which the poem comes to say or mean, and which is generated or discovered in the poem during the writing. That’s not quite right because it suggests that the poet recognizes the real subject. The poet may not be aware of what the real subject is but only have some instinctive feeling that the poem is done.
Young poets find it difficult to free themselves from the initiating subject. The poet puts down the title: “Autumn Rain.” He finds two or three good lines about Autumn Rain. Then things start to break down. He cannot find anything more to say about Autumn Rain so he starts making up things, he strains, he goes abstract, he starts telling us the meaning of what he has already said. The mistake he is making, of course, is that he feels obligated to go on talking about Autumn Rain, because that, he feels, is the subject. Well, it isn’t the subject. You don’t know what the subject is, and the moment you run out of things to say about Autumn Rain start talking about something else. In fact, it’s a good idea to talk about something else before you run out of things to say about Autumn Rain.
Hugo is saying that the very uncertainty we began this chapter discussing—the uncertainty that is arguably the most difficult aspect of the creative process for all writers, no matter what skill or experience level—is the driving force behind a creative work. That, rather than attempting to avoid uncertainty, the writer needs to embrace it—even to the point of changing the “subject” from one line to another. Because it is the writer’s imagination that is choosing the next topic, because there must be some connection in the writer’s brain (conscious or unconscious) that leads from one subject to another, then the sequence must be meaningful.
We are always on a path of discovery—if not, the result will be absolute dullness for the reader.
Surprise Yourself, Interest Others
Bad Books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.
Carlos Fuentes
How do you know what you think until you read what you’ve written?
I’m familiar with this kind of writing-as-self-discovery - I wrote almost this exact sentence in a blog post called “the invisible roommate” several years ago.
…Skinner asserts that writing is a much more complex act than simply transcribing existing thoughts into words as accurately as possible. If this were the case, the writer would be doing little more than serving as a “reporter” of past thoughts and experiences already process by the brain. Instead, Skinner argues that the physical act of writing is the cause, not the effect, of new and original thought, and that any creative work that is not a journey of discovery for the writer will, in turn, bore readers. “It’s like driving a car at night,” said novelist Robert Stone about how he copes with this uncertainty when writing longer pieces, “you can only see as far ahead as your headlights, but you can make the entire journey that way.”
Beginning writers find it difficult and painful to tolerate this state of not-knowing. Yet accepting it, embracing it even, represents an important step in a writer’s creative development. Good creative writing is almost always conceived in doubt, and is fueled by an urgent desire to understand something that eludes understanding. Thus the best writing is less about dispelling than acquiring wisdom, less about explaining the point of a given experience to others than about exploring and learning about it oneself.
Obsession as a Creative Virtue
But it’s not enough just to know or unerstand something. You have to be interested. If possible, you should go beyond interest to obsession…
It doesn’t matter how inspired or obsessed you are if you do not possess the skills that allow you to get your emotional experience down on paper. On the other hand, all the skill in the world won’t help you produce a truly moving stry if you just weren’t all that interested in the idea to begin with.
Part 2: EXERCISES
- Things I Was Taught/Things I Was Not Taught
- I Want To Know Why
Bonus: a second Richard Hugo Triggering Town quote from the next chapter, about concrete detail:
Often, if the triggering subject is too big (love, death, faith) rather than localized and finite, the mind tends to shrink. Sir Alexander Fleming observed some mold, and a few years later we had a cure for gonorrhea. But what if the British government had told him to find a cure for gonorrhea? He might have worried so much he would not have noticed the mold. Think small. If you have a big mind, that will show itself. If you can’t think small, try philosophy or social criticism.
Posted January 07, 2018
