What I Write About, Take Three

[rsadelle]

As I've said before, I hate "write what you know." I think it's a crappy piece of fiction writing advice. It leads to people writing characters who are supposed to be different from them but really aren't, it leads to people trying to tell their own stories when they don't yet have the skill for it, and it ignores the part where fiction writers make stuff up.

I think if you flip the verbs, "know what you write" is a very useful piece of advice. That's actually what I put, without comment, at the top of the last two handouts for my writing group's craft chats about doing research and incorporating research. I'm not sure if anyone noticed.

At our last meeting, the topic of deliberately writing your own story came up because there's a piece we're reading that the author has said is at least partly based on their own life. The conversation moved on a bit, and I didn't say everything I was thinking, so you get it now.

The biggest problem with deliberately trying to fictionalize your own story, especially a part of it that you're still living, is that you just don't have the distance. It's really damn hard to be emotionally honest about your own life. A related issue is that real life doesn't always make for good fiction.

I also think it's true that our own stories come out even when they're not the story we think we're telling. I can tell you exactly what three of the other people in my writing group write about, and I know for sure that one of them is her own story.

I've talked before about what I write about (here and here). For a good ten years, the story I told was that of people going away from the people who've known them as children to become their own people as adults and make their own choices, which is what I did. Then it shifted a bit and the story was people becoming who they are in place, which is also something of what I did - I moved back home and finished growing up and realizing what I wanted out of life here.

Now it's shifted again. The (mostly long) serious stories I've been writing in the last few months, the stories that mean something to me - "Fighting For," You Have My Heart (in your hands)," "Nothing Different," "With This Ring," and the accidental marriage fic I'm supposed to be working on the rough spots of today - are all about people who already know who they are dealing with the consequences of choices they've made, often without knowing beforehand what those consequences will be. That, of course, is my story now. I'm very secure in who I am, and I'm dealing with the consequences of my choice to spend over a year unemployed, trying to write something that I could sell.

Comments

[megyal]

I love the verbs are shifted around in this post; I've always heard I should write what I know, but lots of times I just don't, whether it's a cultural thing or just that division of gender. So I just try to find out as much as I can about what I would like to write, whether it's to bug my friends (thank goodness I have three or four doctors on the flist, so I can ask them stuff that relates to medicine) or Google it. Most of the info doesn't get into the body of fic, at least, but it's there in the breathing and the blood.

Off to read more of your essays and stories!

[rsadelle]

♥ You're doing exactly what I think writers should do. I also made the point to my writing group that a lot of research is background; you as the writer need to know a lot more than what makes it directly into the story, whether that's factual research or stuff about who the character is.

[megyal]

Awesome; your thoughts on your own writing are really helpful in making me think about mine.

[rsadelle]

Aww, that's very cool! (I feel that I should forewarn you, although you'll notice it if you read my other two what I write about entries, that figuring out what your work is about if you don't already know can be a tough thing to deal with. I'm calmer about it now, but the first time freaked me out, and I've seen that happen with other people too.)