The Second Commandment of Writing: Write What You Know?
This continues my series in which I tackle the great pieces of literary advice. Any writer who has ever studied the craft has stumbled upon this phrase. Some writers swear by it. Some writers protest it. But how many understand this phrase?
First, we must understand what it doesn’t mean. “Write what you know” does not mean to restrict you to autobiographical stories. It does not restrict you to memoirs. Nor does it restrict who or what you write. If you are a twenty-something millennial, then it does not force you to only write twenty-something millennials. If you are a teacher or a fast-food worker, it does not limit you to writing fast-food workers. “Write what you know” is not a restriction upon your creativity or ingenuity. Those traits form the heart of any writer’s work.
What does it mean then?
I view this literary idiom as having multiple applications and interpretations.
You Know Emotion
Writers should draw upon their emotional experiences to create realistic emotions and actions within their characters. When you are writing a character who is frustrated or scared, recall a time when you yourself were incensed or terrified. This is something akin to ‘method acting’ (another widely misunderstood term). You use your own memories of those emotions to solidify your understanding of the character’s mindset.
The question arises then; How do I write a character who is feeling something I’ve never felt?
This is where an author’s creativity comes in. Imagine you are writing a character who has just committed a murder. You have (presumably) never committed a murder. How could you ‘know’ what that character was feeling? You mutate and magnify your own experiences. An author is reliant upon empathy. You have never committed a murder, but perhaps when you were young you broke something. You tried to sweep the pieces under the rug so that your illicit behavior would go unnoticed. You can recall the initial panic, the paranoia, the fear of punishment, but also the thrill when you felt you might have gotten away scot-free. A good author takes those memories and magnifies them to fit the situation.
Write What You (Can) Know
We writers are fortunate to live in the modern era. The internet is the greatest asset for modern writers. There is a great wealth of knowledge at your fingertips.
Before you write a character, you should do your research. The more distinct their lives are from your own the more research you should do. Research their career. Research the terms and skills they use. If they come from another place in the US, perhaps there are region-specific phrases you can familiarize yourself with. Perhaps there are different cultural beliefs, or cultural traditions your character would know.
As a writer in the modern era you can know almost anything. Write what you know, but research, and know what you’re writing.
This also plays a part into writing fantasy and sci-fi; You may not know what it is like to walk through the streets of a medieval city, but you can research it. You may not know what it is like to be an engineer aboard a space ship, but you can research what it is like to work on a car motor, or a NASA spacecraft. You should also be just as detailed in your research of your own world. You should understand your world just as much as if you were writing any modern or historical setting.
Write What You See
Writers are notorious for borrowing people from their lives and inserting them into their stories. It is something we are accused off constantly. Everyone wants to know what character is based on them. But it is never that simple.
The people in your life are extensions of your experience and understanding. You may not know how to write a character coming home from war, but perhaps you have an uncle who is a veteran. You can base part of your character upon him and his behavior.
You can also base it off another character in other media you have consumed. As writers we should not feel bad while doing this; it is the natural way literary ideas evolve and propagates themselves. While it is important to understand your characters, a writer should have an equal ability to interpret and understand other writers’ characters, and reverse engineer them.
In the same way, you can interpret and understand people as characters, and reverse engineer their actions to be aspects of your character. Perhaps you notice someone on the bus, looking at their phone every five minutes, nervous about missing their stop. You notice their clothing, their foot tapping, the way they put their book away about five minutes before their stop, just to be sure. You can throw these into your vast library of character traits for later use.
As a writer you must know an entire world well enough to tell a story in it, be it the real world or a fictional one. “Write what you know” is often misconstrued as being a limitation upon the author, meant to restrict and confine one’s writing. Rather it is an instruction to write actively, thoughtfully, and emotionally. The second commandment instructs us to use our emotional and situational knowledge to breathe life into our stories.
As “Write what you know” is a counterpoint to itself, my next post will tackle the third commandment of writing: Avoiding Passive Voice.
This post continues my series tackling the commandments of creative writing. My last post explained what is likely the first rule most writers learn: “Show, Don’t Tell”. We show readers through evocative detail, through sensations, rather than telling them. In almost every instance “showing” is preferable.
But, as with every rule exceptions exist. The main benefit that comes from telling, rather than showing, is the brevity. Orson Scott Card wrote about this in his book “Characters and Viewpoints”. His stance on the predicament of Show, Don’t Tell puts a different lens on it. When you “show” a reader a scene, you give it in detail, expanding upon every instance, sensation, and action. You dwell on the minute details. When you “tell” a reader a scene, you do it in summary, painting in broad strokes rather than with a fine brush.
A “shown” scene is multitudes longer than a “told” scene. Think of it akin to the “zoom” on a camera. A scene with a high zoom focuses on the smallest details within a character’s actions. A scene with a low zoom is more general. For more dramatic or important scenes you should zoom in as much as possible, but for other scenes that level of detail is unnecessary. For example, if your character gets fired you would show him confronting his boss. He pleads for his job. Then he has a long shameful walk as he packs up his desk and exits the building. You should write these in great detail. However, the drive home is uneventful, and could be summed up in a single sentence, instead of elaborating on every single passerby in grand detail. When you “tell” the boring or less important scenes you can pace your story and focus on the scenes your readers want to read.
I have also found another use for telling. Showing places you in the character's mindset. Telling does the opposite, removing the reader from the character and creating a distance between them. When you switch between them in prose it creates a sudden dissonance, a literary vertigo. You can use this startling disconnection as a tool. Consider the following section:
He had fallen off the ladder. That was obvious. His legs were bent at odd obtuse angles, his foot pointing this way, his knee pointing that way, like a somewhat abstract sculpture or ballet dancer. His eyes stared straight up. Something about them made him look more like a wax sculpture than a corpse. His bathrobe was wide open, like a royal cape. It looked like someone had spilled fruit punch on the cement, right below his head, had let it run down the driveway and into the grass. Maybe that was his crown.
He was dead all right.
The paragraph is showing. I describe the body thoroughly using comedic tones. The line at the end is telling. I use it as the punch line of a joke. It helps make the scene more comedic by removing the reader from the tragedy of the situation. However, consider if the death was painted more tragically. The telling sentence then could emphasize that matter, to remove the emotion from the scene and let the reader experience the cold bitter truth of this character’s death. To perceive it removed from the moment as an absolute.
I would never claim “Show, Don’t Tell” is a bad rule, or something we shouldn’t follow. It is one of the most important things to keep in mind while writing, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be mitigated, or maneuvered around. However, if you want to break a rule, it is best to understand it first, and understand what you do in breaking it, and why you are breaking it.
With my next post in this series, I intend to tackle the second most common writing advice you will hear; “Write what you know”.
Scripturiently,
Crow
