In Defense of Writing What You Don't Know
Sharon Oard Warner
December 1996
Maybe you've had a similar experience. When I was in my early twenties and a junior or senior in college, people often inquired about my plans: "So, what do you want to do with your life?" Confronted with this query, my impulse was to lie or to laugh. You see, I hadn't approached higher education with any practical aims in mind. So far as I could tell, my major in philosophy was preparing me for two things-to think deeply and live cheaply. If relatives asked about my plans, I made noise about going to law school. But with strangers, I told the truth: I wanted to write. I was already writing short fiction, and, one way or another, I hoped to make my way through writing. Invariably, these curious strangers responded to my confession by doing something I found inexplicable at the time-they launched into a story.
Sometimes, the story was short, but most often it was long and tedious, and the person telling it was certain that he or she was doing me the favor of a lifetime. These encounters usually ended with the storyteller reaching across the table or the seat of the airplane to pat my hand. "You can have it," the stranger would say, as though bequeathing me a great gift. I was being given something valuable, a confidence, but I was too young and impatient to appreciate that fact. Instead, my internal response went something like this: "Don't they think I have my own stories? What's the point of writing if you're only going to tell other people's stories?"
Indeed. I've come around to thinking that writing fiction is all about telling other people's stories. Not just anybody's stories, but the stories that make you catch your breath, that make you stop and think, that make you want to crawl into another person's skin and hold still until a stranger's heartbeat becomes your own. What would it be like to grow up with two parents who are blind? Why does someone become a beekeeper, a bus driver, a child abuser? How does it feel to adopt a child, divorce your husband, deliver a baby or shoot a stranger? What do we talk about when we talk about love?
Josephine Humphreys has said that stories are "the writer's response to the most important question he can ask." She goes on to explain that "the question is simple and nearly always the same." Here, she is probably referring to those large, philosophical queries, the kind that crop up when we're children and plague us until we're old. But she would likely agree that fiction is about smaller questions as well. Simply reading the newspaper or watching the news is likely to provoke any number of such questions: Why do gang members send policemen their photographs? How can you rob a bank without a gun? What woman in her right mind would attempt to carry eight babies at once to term? Writing fiction is a way of satisfying our curiosity about such things. If we succeed in our quest to find out, we may well answer the questions of our readers, or else urge them to questions of their own. As a genre, as a way of life, fiction is primarily exploratory; it's an approach to understanding the world.
Back in the days when I was announcing to strangers that I wanted to be a writer, I wrote a story called "An Exercise in Understanding." Recently, I dug it out of the file cabinet and took another look. It isn't very good. Certainly, I wrote it knowing that it was an exercise, a way of learning, hence the title. I never tried to publish it, and I haven't thought about it in years, but I still remember the impulse that led me to write it. My Aunt Rene was my godmother, my mother's sister, a wonderful woman I learned to love when I was a small child. It turned out that my Aunt Rene was also a schizophrenic. Though she functioned well enough in my early childhood-taking me to the circus to see the trapeze artist and to the park to frolic with her little pug dogs-as I got older, she retreated into mental illness.
Later in her life, when I was beginning to live on my own, Rene had to depend upon the care of others. Sometimes, she lived with her parents, other times in the state hospital in Terrell or in a halfway house or a nursing home. By the time I was twenty, I'd been to visit her in all of these places. Occasionally, she greeted me with a warm hug and smile, but often she had only a blank stare to offer. Those were the worst times, when she didn't recognize her visitor, when the things she muttered made no sense to me, regardless of which way I held them up to the light.
Once, when she was cognizant, Rene told me about a job she had folding surgical jackets. My aunt had been trained as a nurse, but she could no longer work as one. By the time I reached adulthood, that part of her life was over. If she worked at all, it was at some menial task like folding clothes, which only required that her fingers still be under her control. A few times in my life, I have loved others with an unreasonable devotion, and my aunt is one of those people. I wrote the story "Exercise in Understanding" to try to understand what it was like to be Lorena Curtis, a person whose life had narrowed and narrowed until she was left with only the thread of daily routine. Surely, part of my impulse was defensive. Schizophrenia runs on both sides of my family, and other mental illnesses plague those near to me. As an adolescent, I was sometimes paralyzed by the fear of going crazy. Now, as a mother, I sometimes worry that mental illness will descend on one of my children.
Looking back on the story, I find little to remark about. It risks nothing in the way of plot-let's face it, it doesn't have a plot-and I certainly had a lot to learn about prose style and paragraph structure. Many of the sentences begin with "there is," an expletive construction I now mark in my student's stories. But what I still value about this attempt is the experiment itself. As the title suggests, I was attempting to enter my aunt's head. How did she think? What was a day in her life like, anyway? Could I go there and be her for a few moments?
No. Rereading the story, I realize that I did not go there. I did not find out what it was like to be Lorena Curtis. But I did do something useful, both as a writer and as a human being. I made the attempt to leave my own life and enter someone else's. In this case, I tried to find out what it was like to wake in the morning, not knowing how the world would arrange itself on that particular day, not knowing whether the people around me would be familiar or strange, and on the best of these days, to go to work at a center for the disadvantaged and fold surgical jackets. What would be the compensations in such a life? Rereading the story, I see that I was looking for them. I notice that the narrator of the story is "graced by the light from the window and the warmth it creates on her scalp." That's something, a small something, and so I still value the attempt.
One of the old saws that writing teachers haul out at the slightest provocation is this one: "Write about what you know." I don't know who said it first, and if you do, please be sure and tell me. In any case, it's a well-worn maxim, nearly as revered as "Show, don't tell." Beginning writers chant it to themselves and to each other. Write about what you know. Write about what you know. Said rapidly enough, the maxim could serve as a mantra, lulling one into a deep trance, a false relaxation. But what does it mean to write about what you know? And is it useful advice?
Most of us probably take it to mean that we should write about what's familiar and close at hand. Since I was born and raised in Texas, I should write about Texas. Having lived in Iowa for seven years, I might reasonably set a story in Iowa. But a story about New Mexico might be premature, even risky. I've only lived in Albuquerque for a year and a half, and we can all agree that such a short length of time is barely enough to learn how to spell the city name-all thoseus andqs are certainly tricky. And what if I were to write out of a setting that's entirely unfamiliar? Well, that would definitely be flouting the maxim. And yet I've done just that, and so far, no one has thought to complain.
I began the storyChristina's Worldbecause I was fascinated by Andrew Wyeth's painting of a woman sprawled in a field, staring up at a house on a hill. Who was Christina, anyway, and what was she doing sprawled in that field? In a quote about the painting, Wyeth said, "The way this tempera happened, I was in an upstairs room in the Olson house and saw Christina crawling in the field." If he knew why she was there, he never said. (Painters are curious, too, but their curiosity runs in different directions. "I search for the realness," Wyeth has said, "the real feeling of a subject, all the texture around it....")
When it came toChristina's World,my initial impulse was to make it all up, but a little research led to a little more, and pretty soon I was writing something I've heard referred to as "faction," part truth and part fiction. I learned, for instance, that Christina Olson was stricken with polio as a child, and as she went into adolescence, her frail legs could no longer support her weight. Rather than resort to a wheelchair, Christina got around by way of a regular kitchen chair, hitching it across the room with an awkward jerking motion. Her brother, Alvaro, who loved nothing more than the life of a fisherman, gave up the sea to care first for his father and later for Christina. They were a proud and isolated family, too poor to do repairs on the house. When the glass broke in the windows, they stuffed the holes with rags.
On their mother's side, Christina and Alvaro were related to Nathaniel Hawthorne, the writer, and to John Hathorne, the chief judge of the Salem witch trails. All this information fascinated me. By the time I was finished with inter-library loan, I had the details I needed to bring the story to life and convince readers of the setting, Cushing, Maine, a place I've only been to in my imagination.
But my research didn't provide any answers to my initial questions: why did Christina crawl into the field; what was she trying to see? Here, I was working from the same impulses that led me to write the story about my aunt; only this time, I had considerable experience in writing fiction. This time around, I was able to immerse myself in Christina Olson's world and dream up plausible answers to my questions, and because of that, I consider the story a success.
In his profound and opinionated book,The Art of Fiction,John Gardner advises writers with regard to the maxim of writing about what you know:
Let us suppose the writer has mastered the rudiments. How should he begin on fiction? What should he write about, and how can he know when he's done it well?
A common and usually unfortunate answer is "Write about what you know." Nothing can be more limiting to the imagination, nothing is quicker to turn on the psyche's censoring devices and distortion systems, than trying to write truthfully and interestingly about one's own home town, one's Episcopalian mother, one's crippled younger sister. For some writers, the advice may work, but when it does, it usually works by curious accident: The writer writes well about what he knows because he has read primarily fiction of just this kind-realistic fiction of the sort we associate withThe New Yorker, The Atlantic, orHarper's. The writer, in other words, is presenting not so much what he knows about life as what he knows about a particular literary genre. A better answer, though still not an ideal one, might have been "Write the kind of story you know and like best-a ghost story, a science-fiction piece, a realistic story about your childhood, or whatever."
While Gardner's advice is certainly sound, I agree that his answer isn't ideal. By and large, writers automatically stick to the genres they know and love the best. The only reason to do otherwise is to try and make a quick buck. I've known literary writers to dally with romance and mystery for just this reason, particularly given the climate in the present-day marketplace. By and large, though, we tend to write the sort of thing we read, or at least we do our damndest. Thus, I want to offer what I hope is more pointed advice. (Yes, it's difficult to dispute Gardner, though he's left us for loftier lodgings. Even now, I feel his spirit hovering over my computer.) Here goes: Rather than writing about what you know, or the kind of story you like best, write about what you want to know. Write about what you yearn to understand, what you're dying to experience, what you seek to explain. Write out of your own deepest longings and out of your idle curiosity. Write out of your guts rather than out of your memories.
During the summer of 1993, in the midst of the great flood that turned the midwest into a sea fit for Noah's Ark, I attended a reading at Prairie Lights Bookstore in Iowa City. About then, Iowa was on the verge of complete submersion. Both exits into Iowa City were blocked by water, and in some parts of the city only the roofs of houses were still visible. The basement of the building where I was teaching was flooded. All day every day, volunteers labored to stack sandbags in a make-shift barricade around the Union, where I was staying. Each morning I awoke and rushed to my window to see how high the river had risen overnight.
Even so, the business of publicizing a novel goes on, and Mark Richard had come to town to read from his new novel,Fishboy. Considering our circumstances, the title was fitting, and a large crowd showed up to hear him. It would be the last reading of the summer at Prairie Lights Bookstore. Access to the airport proved too undependable. Much of the rest of the summer the highway would be completely under water.
In any case, Mark Richard was clearly pleased to have made it to the scene of a disaster area, and in keeping with the local atmosphere, he decided to read a short story from his collection,Ice at the Bottom of the World.The story is called "On the Rope" and it's about the aftermath of another great flood, this one in Louisiana. It's been a while since I heard his explanation of the story, but I believe I recollect the gist of it.
Before he began reading, Mark Richard told us he'd written the story to better understand an uncle, one of the walking wounded, a man who was most often distant and depressed. Despite the uncle's difficult personality, people in the family treated the man with kid gloves. As a boy, Mark Richard had no idea what had happened to his uncle, but as he grew older, he began to piece the story together. As a young man, the uncle had bought a wooden power boat, and he spent considerable time and money putting the boat in prime condition. The boat was his pride and joy and he'd just completed work on it when a devastating hurricane hit the coast. After the storm passed, the Coast Guard put out a call for volunteers with boats. The uncle volunteered, thinking he would be rescuing survivors, but, in fact, he was put to work recovering bodies. The dead numbered in the hundreds. Mark Richard's uncle motored out on the water in his beautiful boat and stayed out for three days straight, hauling bodies over the side and returning them to shore. And when the work was finished, some part of the uncle was dead, too.
Mark Richard wanted to imagine what the experience had been like for his uncle, so he wrote a story. The story he read to us wasn't something he knew beforehand; rather, it was something he wanted to know, something he needed to understand. And evidently, he got it right because when his uncle showed up unexpectedly at a reading in Louisiana, Mark Richard screwed up his courage and read "On the Rope." Afterward, the uncle lumbered up and gave his nephew a pat on the shoulder. "That's just the way it happened," he said.
Now, Mark Richard doesn't have psychic powers, at least none he told us about that night. If he'd admitted to being a psychic, we would have asked him just when it was going to stop raining. So when the author's uncle said, "that's just the way it happened," I don't think he was referring to the specific details, the chronology of events or the actual bodies described in the story. Rather, he was referring to the cumulative effect of those three days, the toil and the horror and the disbelief. Those are things the story describes in a very matter-of-fact way. Mark Richard used his imagination to recreate the scene and his heart to imagine the consequences. Thus, the story rings true, even to the one who actually lived through it.