the where of it

write what you know. or don’t.

• Posted by Summer Wood on March 19th, 2009 filed in craft of writing
• 1 Comment »

Write what you know.  It tops the list in advice given to the aspiring writer.  And it drives me crazy.

To put it bluntly:  I write to explore what I don’t know.

I won’t deny that there’s good reason for the advice.  The best writing is often highly specific and effectively detailed, and relies on the fundamental authenticity of the author’s experience.  In memoir, where we depend on the writer to deliver a (theoretically) verifiable truth, this becomes a moral issue.  Even in realistic fiction it is jarring to come across a passage that doesn’t match with what we believe to be true about a place or a person or an event.

When it comes to place in particular, it seems that verity – stone cold facts, acquired by personal experience – should be paramount.  So if you know a place, you should be better positioned to write it accurately and effectively.  If, say, you’ve lived there all your life.  Or – for twenty years.  Or, let’s say you visited it once, in the seventh grade.  Or read about it in a letter from your fiancé, who’s stationed there.  What if you went to the library and checked out some books?  With pictures?

Where, exactly, do you draw the line?  And what value does that line have?

This is a pertinent technical question for me.  I’m writing a novel set in California’s Lost Coast, a place I’m fascinated by and have visited many times.  But I’ve never lived there.  I’m not friends with anybody who has.  There’s tons I don’t know about the place, and every time I try to pin down a “truth”, it shifts.

And yet, the Lost Coast of my novel lives so vividly in my head that I have no trouble bringing it to the page.

I will argue that when you write a place into existence, you are creating it, uniquely and from scratch.  Your experience with the actual place is both boon and impediment.  Yes, you need authentic details.  (But throw out the clichés, please.)  Yes, you need a clear grasp of the feel of the place, physically and culturally.  But your attempts at geographic verity may get in your way more than they help you.  Your efforts to be accurate can stymie the free run of your imagination as it calls this specific place – this fiction – into being.

When I attended the Associated Writing Programs conference in Chicago this February, I listened to a panel of writers discuss the use and abuse of the omniscient voice.  The remarks of one panelist, Laura Kasischke (a poet and fiction writer), have continued to play in my head.  She talked about Stephen Crane, who wrote THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE – widely acknowledged to be one of the great war novels of all time – without having experienced the battlefield.

Her point was that the imaginative force of the work (as embodied in the narration) must be so thoroughly steeped in the terrain of its subject that it assumes complete authority for such.  Crane imagined his battlefield into being, fully and credibly.

Does that mean you can get away without accurate details?  Of course not.  What it means is that, whether you’ve spent your whole life in the place you write about, or you rely on research to provide you the facts you need about a place you’ve never seen, you are never exempt from the primary requirement.

You have to imagine the place into life with words.

Whether that gives you the moral authority to set your story there is another question.  Anybody care to weigh in?