JCB's Ruminations on the Craft of Fiction #55
June 10, 2021
This week I’d like to talk about the advice to "write what you know" and how I thought about it while drafting a recent story. There are many ways to (mis-)understand the advice to write what we know, and by no means do I mean to explain the definitive purpose of this advice. Like all advice, if it works for you, and it helps you create something good, it’s useful.
I’ve wanted to write a story about swimming for a long time, and I collected together a vague list of my real-life swimming adventures and escapades. They were the kinds of stories I might tell in casual conversation, a little bit of a "there was this one time--" about them. I knew all the sensory and significant details, the important moments and the boring parts I could easily leave off the page. In this way, in this particular case, to write what I know was to write about swimming. The problem was that because these vignettes were all true, there was no connected story behind them except my own love of swimming and freediving. What I didn’t have was a story.
I needed something to bring it all together, to give purpose to the telling. In fact, I realized I didn’t really have a character, because there’s nothing about me in particular that would make me the obvious protagonist in a story about those situations. So I asked myself, What kind of a person might be a person compelled to swim so much? The key for me was to consider the compulsion: why was he swimming? Was he trying to escape something? What drove him into the water? Once I began to answer that question, to figure out why, the rest of the character’s life started to fall into place: there’s a trauma in his past for which he uses swimming to cope and escape. And obviously the trauma has to come back as a part of the story, and it has to confront him somehow, even if it’s only metaphorically and he’s not consciously aware that’s what’s happening. The trauma, I decided, should involve swimming. And as soon as I hung concrete specifics for the character onto that structure, I had a story, and the writing was easy. Well. "Easy."
In the end, I was able to write about all of my past swimming adventures, and it was delightful when little real-life details found new meaning in the eyes of the character I’d invented for the story. A mere curiosity from my past could become a representative metaphor for him. And because I was writing what I know so well, there was quite a lot to pull from.
Next: On Drama