"Don’t Write What you Know" (huh)

(A Thanks to Jean Heimann for posting the referenced essay on the CWO. Found it fascinating)

The Atlantic Magazine published an essay by Bret Johnston titled, “Don’t Write What You Know”. Mr.Johnston teaches an introductory fiction workshop at Harvard University. He passes out a bullet list to the students citing things that they should avoid. The final item on the list is the title to today’s blog. He states in the essay that after the students read this final item that “the idea panics his students because they have always been encouraged to “write what you know”.

Naturally—I panicked because I too, have heard this vicious, insidious type of encouragement –for years. I always assumed that what I wrote was somehow, in someway, coming from something I knew. I mean, if I take some words and use them to create some outlandish,  multi-colored space monkey who speaks several languages and eats yogurt instead of bananas, I assume that somewhere inside me I was, at one time or another, exposed to some strange monkey business and I have stretched it out into something that is non-existent and I do not even know that I  knew it in the first place. (Hey–it makes sense to me)

Mr. Johnston wrote, “an essential part of me dies when the student says, ‘What I wanted to do was—‘. The idea  of a writer wanting to do something in a story unhinges me—”  That sentence unhinged me. Don’t we want to do something when we write something? Do we not sense a purpose, a reason, a goal? If I get in the car to simply go for an unplanned ride I still have to know how to start the thing and guide it in different directions, right?

The point of all this is that sometimes (maybe many times) writing advice overloads me. Story structure, planned plot, flow, imagery, dialogue, how to do this and how not to do that. If I keep referencing all that stuff over and over all I learn is that I know less and less. My confidence wanes and it becomes reverse education. For me, I never actually know where I am going. My blank paper is my plot of land. My pencil/pen is my dump truck which is loaded with all the material I need to build my “dream house” from footers to finished trim and paint. I empty the dump truck on the paper and then I begin to sort everything  out and put it together. I do not think I could do it if I did not know what I know. Trust me, I will not paint the drywall until it is installed, taped and finished. There are many who will not like the color of the paint I chose. No problem, they can paint their house any color they like.