Write what you DON'T know (yet)

One of the platitudes that instructors repeat in creative writing workshops is "write what you know." There is good reason to heed this rule. Usually enforced in fiction writing workshops, “write about what you know” helps prevent 18-year-olds who grew up in middle-class American suburbs from submitting wretchedly unrealistic drafts of stories set in sub-Saharan Africa, or the trackless Amazon rain forest, or outer space. These students would be better served to set their stories in a suburban American high school, or their own family homes, environments about which they could speak with some accuracy and authority.

Of course, I have my own humorous anecdote about naively writing "what I didn't know." I still vividly recall a day 35 years ago when our inspirational 10th-grade English teacher, the late Dan Dinicola, popped open a leather briefcase in class and read to us a passage from an original short story he was writing and planning to submit to a magazine for publication. I know that this sounds ridiculous, but the idea that any ordinary person could sit down and write an original piece of fiction and try to have it published was a major revelation to my provincial, half-awake, adolescent mind. So, fired with inspiration, I rushed home after school and took out my portable typewriter (yes, this was pre-internet, pre-PC, pre-smartphone 1979...) and immediately ran up against the brick wall of a lack of a topic to write about. Now, I was a precocious reader and had just finished John Kennedy Toole's cult fiction novel A Confederacy of Dunces. Today, I recall almost nothing about this book, but I think it was set in New Orleans. So I cobbled together an "idea" about a young man journeying to New Orleans aboard a passenger train. This would be the subject of my brilliant story! Two major problems with this idea: 1.) I had never been on a train in my life, and 2.) I had never been to New Orleans in my life and knew nothing about that city. Did I just hear the conductor shout, "Next stop: total lack of verisimilitude!"? It is, of course, laughable. But I didn't stop there -- fueled by youthful hubris, I mailed off my typed manuscript to a magazine. Which one? Oh, just the most prestigious periodical in America, The New Yorker (which, by the way, I’m pretty sure I had never read a single issue of). Needless to say, the rejection slip for this story written by a 15-year-old was returned in record time!

Well, this digression down Absurdity Lane brings me to my main point: if I had bothered to conduct some research about passenger trains and New Orleans, it might have been possible (though unlikely, given my inexperience) to write a competent story on these subjects. Certainly, it would have been a better story. And in nonfiction writing, it's important to write about topics beyond your personal experience. But you must first put in the work (reading, studying, researching, interviewing, traveling) to collect the information you need and gain that experience. So don’t limit yourself to writing about what you know; write about what you don’t know … yet (after you know about it, of course!)

PS -- There is another micro-lesson in the goofy tale of my first attempt to write a short story. I didn’t allow that rejection slip to make me stop writing. Never give up. Never quit. Bad writing is a prerequisite of good writing. In the end, the only writers who fail are those who stop writing.

© 2014 Bob Dial.  All rights reserved.