Write What You Know and Thoughts on being Honest

There are three essays in a row at the beginning of The Writer's Notebook II: Craft Essays from Tin House that deal with truth in fiction and writing what you know.  It's a theme that keeps rearing its head, and I can't tell if these essays were put together for this very reason or if the topic is just on my mind and I'm seeing it everywhere.

"Don't Write What You Know" by Bret Anthony Johnston talks about how if you restrict yourself to writing what you know, to events that actually happened, you're limiting the potential of your story and depriving it of some of its magic.  I can got behind this completely.  I find that life as it happens hardly ever fits into narrative structures enough for me to tell a good story. 

Take for example my lackluster trip to the DMV on Wednesday.  The line was short and I was in and out in twenty minutes, not including the 45 minute bus ride there and back.  They had technical problems so they could only accept cash or check, but--for reasons too boring for me to repeat--I just so happened to have enough cash on me.  One of the tellers had a DMV pun for every line of his standard driver's license renewal speech, and I bounced on my heels hoping the other teller would call me over, which he did.  It was anti-climactic to the point where I had to stop myself a half dozen times while writing this paragraph to not add in some excitement. 

That's usually what I do.  You could chalk it up to a long lineage of story tellers or you could say I'm a pathological liar, but I'm so disappointed that I spent two hours of my life getting a temporary driver's license and the universe didn't even bother to dish out some drama.  I think it's only fair that if I ever tell this story again, it will end with a screaming match between the guy in line who had to run to the ATM and the teller with the horrible jokes.  The blog is called Twenty Percent True for a reason. 

So Johnston's advice to not tie yourself to the truth didn't apply to me, but did provide a nice way to talk about it. 

But in "Good Form," one of the short-short stories in the collection, the narrator says, "Story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth."...by choosing fiction here...he tacitly acknowledges that something is gained by setting imagination loose on history, something profound and revolutionary and vital: empathy...O'Brian writes:

Here is the happening-truth, I was once a soldier.  There were many bodies, real bodies with real faces, but I was young then and afraid to look...

Here is the story-truth.  He was a slim, dead, almost dainty young man of about twenty.  He lay in the center of a red clay trail near the village of My Khe.  His jaw was in his throat.  His one eye was shut, the other was a star-shaped hole.  I killed him.

I have goose bumps.

I do take issue with his assertion here, talking about how his students shy away from writing what they don't know about "race or gender, sexuality or class" and how they revert back to what they don't know:

I argue that if the subject or character is intimidating, then that's exactly what the writer should be exploring in fiction.  My students worry about being invasive or predatory, and few things frighten them more than charges of appropriation and literary trespassing.  But I see an altogether more menacing threat: the devaluing not only of imagination but also of compassion. 

Ehhhhh.  Okay.  I agree that compassion is paramount when writing about a culture of which you're not a part, and compassion can take you a long way because people who are different from you still feel pain and joy and love and fear.  Thinking they don't is monstrous.  However, thinking that all people are just like you and writing about them without getting to know how they might be different, without understanding how the world is different for them is self-centered and reeks of colorblindness.  You should do research about other cultures before you write about them.  You should fear appropriation (you shouldn't fear charges of appropriation, you should fear appropriation) and you should fear literary trespassing.  Those hurt people.  I agree that you should include diverse characters in your fiction, and that you should also feel intimidated as you do so.  But "Go for it!  You have empathy!" is simplistic and feels like it's coming from a place of privilege.

So I like that the next essay is Steve Almond's "Funny is the New Deep: An Exploration of the Comic Impulse."  Here, Almond asserts that it's funny when you talk about the horrible, embarrassing truths that you experience. 

Take for example, the horrible cold that I currently have and will have forever.  The gunk is lodged too low in my sinuses to come out my nose, but too high for coughing to move it.  I can feel it fester.  I keep making insulting, wet, hacking noises that don't do anything but make me look and sound revolting.  That doesn't stop me.  Because maybe a BIGGER cough will do the trick.  Or maybe a bunch of little snorting sucks all in a row like a piglet.  I want to reach up through the roof of my mouth to the back of my throat and massage that gunk into movement, loosen it up.  I keep thinking maybe I could reach it from the back; if my two fingers could only phase through matter, I could reach in through the base of my skull and coax it all out.  But of course I can't do that, so I'm just poking myself repeatedly in the back of the neck, and that doesn't get the snot moving.

I hope my sharing this is kind of funny.  I hope it's funny because you've experienced it (and I hope you've experienced it because everyone should know in intimate detail how uncomfortable I am), and I hope you're going, "Yes!  That's what that's like!  Haha!"  I hope you relate to this and you're looking back on your own experience and--with some distance--seeing the humor in it.  I hope it's a relief that I've put this situation into words and that I'm acknowledging that it happens and maybe you laugh because a weight has been lifted that it's out in the open or maybe you laugh out of nervousness because I've just written an essay about snot and you don't know how to react to that.  I hope you're laughing at my misfortune, because I'm giving you permission to laugh at me by presenting this with all the honesty I can muster (which we all know is hard for me).

My critique group went over some of my work earlier this week and there's a line in there about one of the characters over-exerting himself to the point where he couldn't control his accent and it took a sharp turn towards hillbilly.  This has never happened to me.  I have complete control at all times over all hard vowel sounds.  One of my critique partners told me she "laughed and laughed" at that line.  After a moment of disorientation, because that's not funny, it's tragic, I took the compliment and stayed quiet.

So there's a lot to be said for truth and honesty.

Finally, there's Andrea Barrett's "Research in Fiction," which brings up arguments I've had about how research can be a way to procrastinate from actually writing and how sometimes research gets lumped into a story so that it's less about the characters and more about "look how much research I did!"  But the neat thing here is that she talks about using research for what Johnston would call the happening-truth, and then launching the story-truth from there.  She talks about how research informs what the characters have experienced and what they know.  And in the end she gets at Johnston's empathy point in a way that gives me fewer heebie-jeebies. 

The old adage "write what you know" is true in one way, but not in the most limited way: it doesn't mean we can only write about what we know directly from our own experiences.  A more generous, more useful interpretation of the phrase is that we should write about what we know, however we come to know it, whether by vision or sensual experience or reading or conversation or passionate imagining.  That, in the end, is what research is for.