Should We Write What We Know?

I just finished reading an essay in the "Fiction 2011" issue of The Atlantic in which the author Bret Anthony Johnston argues against the old writing mantra of "Write What You Know." Johnston claims that the students in his college Introduction to Fiction Workshop, "like all writers...have been encouraged, explicitly or implicitly, for as long as they can remember, to write what they know," which I consider a bit of an exaggeration -- I've taken multiple creative writing courses since I was a kid, and the only time I can remember being told to write what I know was in a book on screenwriting -- but I will admit to being aware of the idea, and to have never really questioned its validity before reading Johnston's essay. "Write what you know" seems like pretty sage advice, because what it's really saying is that you should have some basic knowledge about a subject before you incorporate it into your writing; you don't want to find yourself ten pages into a story about a forensic scientist before realizing you might need to know something about forensic science to make the story interesting.

What Johnston suggests, however, is that writing what you know limits your imagination, that it stunts your story before it even begins by setting up boundaries for your fiction within the realm of your own experience.  Writing what you know makes you timid, he says, prone to saying things like, "What I wanted to do was ______" and "I'm not comfortable writing about ______," and it also teaches you to depend too much on transcribing real events, the "realness" of which will always make your second-hand account pale in comparison. If, on the other hand, you take one of your own experiences and have it play out how you wish it might have happened, or fear it could have happened, or any combination in between, then the strength of your fiction is limitless. Little by little, "what you know" will fall away and what remains will truly be a product of your imagination.

Now, in some respects, I agree with what Johnston is saying. Transcribing reality is for nonfiction writers and biographers -- it really has no place in fiction, not only because it hampers a writer's style but also because it betrays the very nature of what fiction is. Fiction can, and should, be anything except a rehashing of reality. Reading a fiction writer's retelling of something that really happened to him (or someone he knows) is usually pretty boring for everyone except the author and his close circle of friends, because the inspirations for the stories and characters are what matter in this case, not the stories themselves.  As Johnston puts it, "Stories aren't about things. Stories are things."

My problem with Johnston's essay is that, in the end, he's actually making an argument against people who write only what they've experienced, not against those who are writing what they know -- and there's a big difference. "Write what you know" does not mean, and was never intended to mean, that you should only permit yourself to write about things borne directly from your own life, because to suggest such a thing would mean that only soldiers should write about war, that only doctors should right about medicine, and that only space aliens should write about space aliens. People who approach fiction from that perspective are doing it because they misunderstand the principle behind "write what you know," not because they're shackled by it. "Write what you know" means that you take your personal experience of the world and apply it to whatever scenarios your imagination invents, whether or not that scenario bears any resemblance to your real life. Can a straight man write about being gay? Of course he can, so long as he uses his own knowledge of the human condition to flesh out his characters, along with constant input from his imagination. (Now, some gay people might not like that he's writing about them from a straight man's perspective, but that's another issue entirely.)

"Write what you know" is supposed to help your writing, not hinder it. It doesn't tell you not to write a murder mystery if you've never been involved in a murder, but it does say to maybe set the murder in a location similar to one you know, rather than setting it in Venice just because Italy seems more exciting than Small Town, U.S.A. You'd be surprised how easily your imagination will soar when you're mapping out a mystery and how easily it will stop cold when you try to describe a real-life city you've never seen. This goes for writing about other time periods, as well -- surely you can write about an English peasant girl falling in love with a medieval knight, but what happens when you don't know what kind of drink the knight would order at the local inn, or if they even had inns in medieval England? (What should happen is that you do some research. People take for granted that fiction can require just as much research as nonfiction writing, but plenty of writers educate themselves about their subjects before they start writing so that thereafter their imaginations can run wild. If you really want to set your murder mystery in Venice, then set it in Venice -- but research the city first, so you don't lose your plot while you're busy worrying about the setting. If I'm writing a rooftop chase scene that ends up with my hero taking a plunge into a Venetian canal, I don't want any doubts lodged in the back of my mind about how close is too close to position the canal relative to his hotel. I'd sooner have him sprout wings and fly away.)

What Johnston never mentions, but what I consider an important truth for any writer, is that "what you know" is not a quantitative amount. People learn new things every day, and they imagine new things every day as well. What you know today might not just be less than what you know tomorrow, it might be different than what you know tomorrow, so the way you relate to your writing is constantly in flux. So long as you don't tie your writing to the finite events of your life, you'll be able to bring something new to the table (so to speak) every time you sit down to write. I think Johnston knows this, too, because even as he advises his students not to write what they know, he admits to doing exactly what I'm talking about in his own writing: "These are the facts: I was born and raised in Corpus Christi, Texas, the part of the country where most every word of fiction I've published takes place. I grew up around horses and hurricanes; my father worried about money...and died young; my mother smoked and paid mightily for it. If you read Corpus Christi: Stories, you'll undoubtedly recognize elements of my life in the stories; however, very few of the experiences in the book are my own." I don't mean to mince words, but as far as I can tell, Johnston is writing what he knows; he's just not always writing what he's experienced.

I have no doubt that, as a teacher of an introductory creative class (even at a school like Harvard), Johnston runs into plenty of students who take "write what you know" to mean "write what you've experienced." As I said, I agree with many of the points he makes in his essay, and if I were constantly reading stories inspired by real-life events, I'd probably be just as anti-"write what you know" as he is. What I wish, however, is that he devoted at least part of his essay to what I consider to be the real danger of the "write what you know" mantra -- that is, the tendency of many writers (including myself) not to put their own experiences into their fiction, but to put themselves into their fiction. The best writers are like actors, able to inhabit the psyches of their characters without letting their own personalities and opinions subsume who those characters are, but it is extremely easy, especially for young writers, to unintentionally let their characters become nothing more than differently-named extensions of themselves, which is probably the quickest way I know of to kill a good story. How can you write a thriller about a vigilante if you're constantly thinking, "But I wouldn't do that...maybe he should just let the bad guys off with a warning." Some writers avoid this trap by projecting their personalities onto less-important supporting characters -- Jane Austen is notorious for doing this -- but most have to work hard at not only disentangling themselves from their characters, but also freeing themselves of the tendency to want to always like their characters. In answer to my original question, I think it's a wonderful idea to write what you know -- so long as you don't end up writing about yourself.