Write what you know
Nov. 10th, 2008 01:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI'm poking around at writer's websites again - I'm not doing NaNo, but it's the season, so.
I been thinking again about that old bit of advice, 'write what you know'.
And it seems so weird, because do we really know much about zombies or vampires or werewolves?
Cybermen and Daleks? Zygons?
Take it too literal and you end up writing stories you know, recycling from someone else's playbook, and while that can be fun, it's not quite what the line is meaning.
The first step is to *see* what you know. Because mostly people wander around and think they don't know much, they're not that special, everyone's life is like theirs.
To some extent, that's true. And that's what you need to be writing. Write what everyone knows, write it carefully and truthfully and from the heart. Write it well and they'll hear it from the heart too. That's what lit crit talks about with words like 'universal'. We know death and the way some people are out to drain us and the way passion just sweeps up and breaks all the rules, so we know zombies and vampires and werewolves. We know people that want to make everyone like them, or want to get rid of everyone not like them. We know people that can look like they're fitting in but are just there to use everyone. Cybermen, Daleks, Zygons. Know what's at the heart of them and you're writing what you know.
But the other thing is, *nobody's* life is like yours. You live your life every day, so you just kind of figure, this is life, this is what it is, this is how it works. The whole world is more or less like one suburban housewife shopping online at Tesco and carpooling the kids to school, or one student in a bedsit carrying ready meals back from the union food outlet every day because they still haven't acquired a freezer. Life is like that.
But only your life is exactly like that. Maybe there's a lot of women in the world, but there's not so many neo-pagan eclectic jedi fortean disabled bisexual English student women, and there's only one of them sitting on my sofa right now. So you learn to look at your own life and figure out which parts are interesting. And there's millions of them. You can make a story out of anything.
I have a matching hat and bag. They didn't come from the same shop or the same time. They're both made of rainbows. The hat started to unravel and the bag dragged on the floor. A friend offered to teach me how to fix it but we didn't have much time together and I never quite learned. Mum fixed the hat. I fixed the bag strap so it's shorter. Now I can wear them both all the time. People recognise the hat. It's on my student union card. Every year when college starts I'll meet new people and they'll remember my name because I'm the one in the hat. And put like that it's not a story with much spark, but weave it together just right and it's a story about diversity and tolerance and helping each other and how people connect over the smallest things and how they fail to connect. And nobody else has that story.
And if I want to put it in my preferred genre I just have to write down why I wear all those colors. I tend not to mention that out loud very much, because many of my little habits kind of add up to why I get the disability label. But it's not about the dis, it's about ability. Colors represent all sorts of things. Passion and power and spirituality. Carry all the colors, carry all the possibilities. All the parts of self, there to be looped back together and made useful again. Brave hat, useful things bag. Spell foci. I go out into the world with tools nobody recognises to fight the demons that lurk somewhere between the bus stop and the library.
And those are the things I know. And those are the things nobody else knows. Until I write my story.
Write what you know. See what you know. Share what's useful and valuable.
I been thinking again about that old bit of advice, 'write what you know'.
And it seems so weird, because do we really know much about zombies or vampires or werewolves?
Cybermen and Daleks? Zygons?
Take it too literal and you end up writing stories you know, recycling from someone else's playbook, and while that can be fun, it's not quite what the line is meaning.
The first step is to *see* what you know. Because mostly people wander around and think they don't know much, they're not that special, everyone's life is like theirs.
To some extent, that's true. And that's what you need to be writing. Write what everyone knows, write it carefully and truthfully and from the heart. Write it well and they'll hear it from the heart too. That's what lit crit talks about with words like 'universal'. We know death and the way some people are out to drain us and the way passion just sweeps up and breaks all the rules, so we know zombies and vampires and werewolves. We know people that want to make everyone like them, or want to get rid of everyone not like them. We know people that can look like they're fitting in but are just there to use everyone. Cybermen, Daleks, Zygons. Know what's at the heart of them and you're writing what you know.
But the other thing is, *nobody's* life is like yours. You live your life every day, so you just kind of figure, this is life, this is what it is, this is how it works. The whole world is more or less like one suburban housewife shopping online at Tesco and carpooling the kids to school, or one student in a bedsit carrying ready meals back from the union food outlet every day because they still haven't acquired a freezer. Life is like that.
But only your life is exactly like that. Maybe there's a lot of women in the world, but there's not so many neo-pagan eclectic jedi fortean disabled bisexual English student women, and there's only one of them sitting on my sofa right now. So you learn to look at your own life and figure out which parts are interesting. And there's millions of them. You can make a story out of anything.
I have a matching hat and bag. They didn't come from the same shop or the same time. They're both made of rainbows. The hat started to unravel and the bag dragged on the floor. A friend offered to teach me how to fix it but we didn't have much time together and I never quite learned. Mum fixed the hat. I fixed the bag strap so it's shorter. Now I can wear them both all the time. People recognise the hat. It's on my student union card. Every year when college starts I'll meet new people and they'll remember my name because I'm the one in the hat. And put like that it's not a story with much spark, but weave it together just right and it's a story about diversity and tolerance and helping each other and how people connect over the smallest things and how they fail to connect. And nobody else has that story.
And if I want to put it in my preferred genre I just have to write down why I wear all those colors. I tend not to mention that out loud very much, because many of my little habits kind of add up to why I get the disability label. But it's not about the dis, it's about ability. Colors represent all sorts of things. Passion and power and spirituality. Carry all the colors, carry all the possibilities. All the parts of self, there to be looped back together and made useful again. Brave hat, useful things bag. Spell foci. I go out into the world with tools nobody recognises to fight the demons that lurk somewhere between the bus stop and the library.
And those are the things I know. And those are the things nobody else knows. Until I write my story.
Write what you know. See what you know. Share what's useful and valuable.
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no subject
Date: 2008-11-10 01:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-10 07:27 pm (UTC)