Debate: Should you just write about what you know?
Mark Twain once said: ‘Write what you know’ and it is something that has echoed around my writerly conscious for a long time. Write about what you know. I took note of these words, when I first heard them. I scribbled them down frantically. Writing Advice 101. Not because they came from such an influential writer, but because they rang true for me. It made a lot of sense: how could you possibly write about things that you were not familiar or things that you could not even begin to understand? You couldn’t, was the simple answer. You shouldn’t, was the more appropriate.
However, it’s not as simple as that. As writers, we want to explore the unknown, we wonder “well if this didn’t happen… then would this happen… what would happen if this happened?” As writers, we are constantly reaching beyond what we know, beyond what we can even understand. It’s a part of our nature. Firstly, we’re nosey. Secondly, our minds are made up of endless flights of stairs, more corridors which cross and intersect and rewind back on themselves, our minds are complicated and shifting and, most predominantly: crazy. We constantly look for the other, for this part that’s beyond the comfort of our Hobbit Holes, the comfort of our 4pm cup of tea.
When I came up with my idea for my dissertation (vignettes following a little girl living in the drug-centered city of Ciudad Juarez on the border of Mexico and El Paso), I was not writing about the stuff that I knew. I watched Breaking Bad over the summer and the image of the man with the turtle on his head smashed into the window of my mind like a body against a wind screen. And I realised that this fascinated me. This world that was so far away from my own and yet existed at the same time fascinated me. I wanted to write about something that I didn’t know. I wanted to write about this world that sat beside my own, just a continent away. I wanted to write about Mexico and the drug war. And I did.
But one thing that constantly nagged me, throughout the writing process, was: what was my right to write about Mexico? Did I have a right to write about a place I didn’t know, to write about a place I had never laid eyes on? And the truth is, I didn’t have a right. I didn’t have a connection with Mexico in any way, other than my interest in the culture, in the Spanish language, in the way their world works. But I think that’s what drew me towards it, the fact that I didn’t know this culture, the fact that I would have to work to figure out and learn about this different world.
I did all of the necessary research: I texted and Facebooked two girls who grew up there, I Google earthed the streets and locations around the area where I was setting the story, I spent hours and hours looking up the right diner for my character to have bought a coffee from (a minor character of no significant in the entire sequence) just to ensure that the authenticity was right. If I could have gone to Juarez, I would have. I couldn’t do this, a) because of insufficient funds in my very bankrupt student current account and b) because Juarez is one of the most dangerous cities in the world (particularly for those writing about the drug culture). I did not paint the world in an insensitive way. I imagined what the world must be like, from what I’d read, from what I’d seen. I did what a writer would do: I imagined and I wrote.
But my point is is that, yes, in some ways I didn’t have a right to write about the culture. The culture was not mine to write about. T.S Eliot reprimands Irving Babbitt for this in his essay After Strange Gods, of writing about a culture you don’t understand and that you should write from the tradition you were born and belong to. But I disagree.By not being part of that world, I had the benefit of the distance, of being able to glimpse in and picture this unimaginably horrific place, as an outsider of the situation. In a way, I did have a right to write about this culture I didn’t know about, write about a culture or experiences that I have not been through myself. Hell, isn’t that what all fiction is anyway? You don’t see a white rabbit running past you on the way to the bus stop every morning calling out ‘I’m late, I’m late!’ nor do you see men with white beards and pointy hands parading around talking about horcruxes or the one ring (unless you happen to have a very unkempt Literature lecturer of Fantasy first thing on a Monday morning).
Fiction is all about writing about stuff that isn’t real, that isn’t right in front of you. Essentially, fiction is writing what you don’t know. If we all stuck to writing what we did know then the world would be filled with autobiographies of middle-class white Literature students complaining about the Starbucks queue before their T.S Eliot seminar. And although some people do write about that, and I’m sure a lot of it is great writing, they have a choice: they have a choice to write about what they do or don’t know.
You could argue that fantasy literature though is not borrowing from a real culture, not borrowing from a place that exists and then shaping it into a fictional piece. But I would have to disagree. Fantasy has to draw on the real for their to be an unreal. George R. R. Martin drew on the War of the Roses for Game of Thrones. J. K Rowling’s world co-exists alongside the real.
Writers, take note. It is more than ok, in fact I would argue it is a good thing to write about what you don’t know. It’s an adventure in itself. Write about what you want to write about: cultures you don’t know, places you’ve never been to, places you may never go to. Obviously, in this day and age, we have the advantage of being able to see places instantly and do things right away with the click of a mouse we have the advantage of a world literally being at our finger tips. Word of warning though, if you are going to write about something you don’t know you should do your research. But at the same time, don’t feel limited in just your knowledge, in the tiny sphere in which you surround yourself. Expand yourself into the world. Just remember: the world was made to fit you in it.
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