Quantum Storytelling

“Write what you know.”

By itself I do not believe this is good advice. Better advice would be “Write what you know, as long as what you know is relevant to others.”

If I work at a bank and do really boring things all day long, should I write about that? Nobody really cares. Maybe even *I* don’t care. Now, if I use my experience from working at a bank to write a compelling and realistic action-thriller about a bank heist—now we’re talking relevance.

When I took part in the National Novel Writing Month, I surveyed the community quite a bit, and got to talk to a lot of writers on the subjects and themes of their stories. A suprising number of them wrote about average people, living average lives where nothing happens. “It’s a story about a bunch of friends, who hang out and occasionally argue.” I hate to kick over the sand castle, but that’s not really a story without conflict, some twists, and something a little more… intriguing or relevant. A point? Unless you’re Larry David with Seinfeld, knowing a lot about nothing won’t get you a good story unless you know how to spin those ordinary nothings into clever jokes of their own.

Yet these writers were just following the age-old advice of “Write what you know!”

A better way to interpret that would be… either you need to know A LOT of things, and can cherry pick the best bits. Or you have a sense of universal themes and values and know how to under-pin those into conflict or controversy within any subject matter.

People love to rip on Dan Brown, but the only other work within pop culture that dared to ask “What if Jesus had children?” was Holy Bood, Holy Grail, and that was in 1982—not exactly recent. If you can’t see why it’s relevant within our pop culture right now, you’re clearly missing the point.

I’m reading Angels & Demons right now, and I fully admit the prose stumbles in a few places, the characters are sometimes embarassingly naive or shallow. Wooden–yes, they are wooden. But I’ll tell you something right now; I don’t care. The story transcends it.

Mr. Brown writes what he knows, and what he knows is The Simple Premise Filled With Controversy & Conflict. Everything else is irrelevant.

After this I think I’ll indulge in the work of another pulpy author, Mr. Heinlein. I’m really not fond of his Ranty McRantinstein Rambler style. Way, WAY too many non-sequiturs. But you know what? His story ideas are too fun to ignore. I can put up with his non-sequiturs because the story ideas and conflict are interesting to me. The same is true for Philip K. Dick. And Asimov. There are many writers who break some or all of the rules of good writing, and yes… their work suffers for it. But I have to be blunt here. IT DOES NOT MATTER.

Story is all that matters.

It should also be stated that writing what you know does not imply that you’re limited to your field of expertise, or specialty. For example, if I did that, I’d write novels that take place in the game industry, with game developers as the central characters. That’s not a bad idea, and I think I could pull that off. But one reason I write is to do something different and get away from my day job. So right now, I don’t really want to write fiction about the game industry. If you work as a dishwasher at the local diner, no–I’d advise you don’t “write what you know” — unless you’re 210% sure you can transform your diswashing job into compelling fiction.

The write-what-you-know advice also seems to ignore the ability for writers to research. Hey, I’m not a detective. I’m not in the CIA. I don’t work for the government. I haven’t done any of these things, and I probably never will. Does that mean I’m unqualified to write about them? If I were writing non-fiction, maybe. But we’re talking about fiction. Does writing what we know mean that we’re all expected to be authority figures of the topics we’re writing about? At what point does that conflict with the goal of writing a story?

It’s the decent premise that most people are fundamentally incapable of begging, borrowing, or stealing–and that incapability of finding the decent premise and incapability to milk it six ways from Sunday is where I feel so much misguidance in creativity comes from. Writing what you know only works if what you know is relevant, or can be made relevant, to the rest of the population. It is this transformation of knowledge that has to take place. Without that transformation, the knowledge is dull and uninteresting to everyone but you.

If my life consists of watching the grass grow, or the paint peel… If that’s what I know, should I write about it? A lot of lib-art minded folks would say “YES! Do your thing and write your book about paint peeling grass growing! Follow your heart! Who knows, it might be the next great work of literature!” Is our peer system that misguided? Or maybe it’s just proof that a good proportion of the population can’t identify a good idea when they see it. This is an area with a lot of room for dishonesty, both with our peers and ourselves.

Everybody is sitting on a gold mine. But can they sift through all the dirt to find it? I’m in the same boat as the rest of you all. Digging for gold is really, really hard work.

The only useful nugget I can derive from the advice to write what you know, is that we all have a certain grasp or perspective on what it means to be human. We all make mistakes from time to time. We all get caught up in the heat of an argument, or occasionally lash out against our opposition. We all know what it feels like to be put down, or put out, at one time or another. These are shared experiences among all human beings, and yet each of us have our own unique instances, our own unique variations on the experience. We can draw from these ‘unique universalities’ to write what we know in a way that helps us exploit themes that resonate, and find our voice. It’s just too bad that explanation isn’t often included when somebody tells you to write what you know. Without such an explanation, the advice to write what you know just becomes another platitude among writers.

Writing what you know means figuring out what you know, or what you’d like to know, filling that gap and then exploiting it for maximum dramatic impact.

What does ‘writing what you know’ mean to you?