What Does ‘Write What You Know’ Mean?

I love The Writer magazine.  Each month, I look forward to reading it from cover to cover, and finding gems of writing wisdom that I can learn from and use.  I have been a subscriber for many years and consider this magazine to be the writing teacher that lives with me.  Whether it’s nonfiction or fiction, poetry or screenplays, The Writer covers it all.

In the July 2010 issue, I discovered a gem that not only illuminated a prickly rule of writing but also deeply moved me for its warm and helpful tone.  Written by the wonderful Ursula K. LeGuin, “Make Your Fiction Truthful” tackles that old rule of “Write What You Know.”  I’ve never really understood what this rule means, actually.  If I wrote what I knew all the time, my writing would be quite narrow indeed.  I write to learn, to expand what I know, to find out about the world and the people who inhabit it.  So, I’ve ignored this rule.  After all, the Perceval series is set in 2048 to 2050, and I cannot know what the future will actually be.

Here’s what LeGuin wrote:

“Write what you know” doesn’t mean you have to know a lot.  It just tells you to take what you have, take who you are, and use it.  Don’t try to use secondhand feeling: use yourself.  Stake your claim, however small it may seem, and dig your own gold mine…. Writing itself, writing fiction or poetry, is a learning device — a means of knowledge, self-knowledge, knowledge of life.”

She agrees with me!  Well, LeGuin wrote the article in first 1991, so I guess it’s probably the other way around.  Anyway, she goes on to talk about the imagination and truthfulness in writing.  She wrote:

If fiction is to be truthful about what human beings really are and do, we have to define knowledge as a goal of the imagination.

A goal not only of the conscious mind, but also of the imagination.  And she goes on to write that a writer’s job is to make what he or she writes true, i.e. to make it seem true as well as revealing the truth of it. 

I felt wonderful after I finished reading this article.  It’s so easy to lose track or to go off the rails, as it were, with my head buried in character arcs, plotting, structure and story, not to mention authentic-sounding dialogue.  Coming up for air and feeling like I’m doing everything wrong, that I haven’t written what I know, and questioning my commitment to writing ends with frustration and despair.  Standardization doesn’t exist in writing.  It’s not like being on an assembly line.  Self-doubt and uncertainty — if I ever get around to getting a couple cats, maybe they’d be good names for them! — are the viruses that infect my creativity at times. 

Here’s what I know and practice for anti-viral medication to fight self-doubt and uncertainty: deflection and containment.  They are bred by the self-censor and released when he feels neglected.  So, I deflect this kind of activity by giving the self-censor something to do, like copyediting something I’ve finished or a critical reading of a short story.  Deflecting the self-censor contains him for a while so that I can return to my no-holds-barred creativity and learning.

Instead of “write what you know,” how about “seek to write what you don’t know” and use yourself as the ideal student.  Rules are meant to guide not imprison….

Reading as a Writer: Lisbeth Salander Again!

In The Girl Who Played With Fire, the second novel in Stieg Larsson’s Millenium Trilogy, Lisbeth Salander takes center stage.  We learn more about her background and how she lives her life, how meeting Mikael Blomkvist changed her life, and how she resolves the major problems in her life.  This novel is also a murder mystery that involves Blomkvist, some of Stockholm’s finest detectives and Lisbeth’s former employer.  Those who have read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo know already that nothing about Salander is conventional, which becomes a major element in the second novel. 

First, I LOVED this novel as much as the Dragon Tattoo, if not more because Salander drives the story.  Her different way of thinking and behaving keeps us wondering what will happen next.  In fact, the only time the story lagged was the section when Salander disappears for a while and no one knows where she is.  The cops’ misadventures and stumbling hold our interest, and Blomkvist’s investigation, but the story still loses its intensity there.  Never fear, Lisbeth returns for the climax and resolution that will stun readers who haven’t been paying close attention.  Those who caught the foreshadowing in the beginning won’t be as surprised.  But Larsson still has some fun tricks up his sleeve for the ending.

Second, Larsson insures that the police are neither all lily white nor pitch black.  In fact, one detective, Faste, challenges patience, and yet his idiocy is supremely human.  I enjoyed having more of a police presence in this story, and spending more time in Stockholm.  Larsson does a good job of aiming his focus on the attitudes and beliefs of his characters, including the police, and how they affect behavior and relationships.  This is probably the most thought-provoking aspect of this novel. 

Third, Mikael Blomkvist provides a strong counterpoint to the other men in Lisbeth’s life, and for us.  He’s not perfect, but he’s more self-aware than he gives himself credit for and he respects Lisbeth.  He’s much needed in this story.  Larsson peels away the layers of behavior and the motivating attitudes  of the criminal men.  What struck me was the stark contrast between Blomkvist’s ability to empathize and the criminals’ total inability.  Larsson shows that the criminals are human beings who are missing what they need to be positive, productive citizens and full human beings.  He does not want us to like them, however, only to understand.

Fourth, Larsson structures the novel in a clever way that’s difficult to do — Lisbeth’s actions structure the overall story which is on top of the police procedural structure that propels Blomkvist and the police.  They meet in an elegant way at the end.  It’s all masterfully done.  Bravo.  I wonder, however, if Larsson didn’t actually plan it that way but simply followed his characters, discovering after the first draft what he’d done.  By grounding the story with the characters and their actions rather than the events of the story, he increases suspense and strengthens the story.

I could not put this novel down, tearing myself away from it to eat, sleep, work.  My only quibble is a small one: in the beginning, when Lisbeth is in the Caribbean, Larsson writes in a hurricane that has formed over two weeks after hurricane season ends in the Caribbean.  It really bugged me.  He could have set this part of the novel a month earlier.  I don’t think it would have made much difference and the storm would have been a more accurate detail.  Overall, I’d strongly recommend this novel, and I look forward with great anticipation to the final installment in the trilogy, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest……

Guilt, Again

Guilt as a character’s motivation can be tricky to pull off without the story turning maudlin.  The best way is to come at the motivation from a sideways angle instead of straight on.  An excellent example of this is the movie The Machinist in which Christian Bale’s character’s guilt motivates his thoughts and behavior but the viewer doesn’t know that until Bale’s character puts all the pieces together of the waking nightmare puzzle that has been his life.  By the time he understands, we do, too, and can truly relate to his visceral reaction.  Over this past weekend, I saw another excellent example in Martin Scorcese’s Shutter Island, based on the Dennis Lehane novel of the same title.

I think Dennis Lehane writes in strong voices powerful stories.  Lehane’s Shutter Island angered me, however.  I felt cheated at the big reveal at the end.  I remember how impressed I was by the first two-thirds of the novel, and then I began to get more and more dissatisfied.  I felt as if Lehane was playing with me (something you don’t want readers to feel).  I did not like at all where Teddy Daniels was headed in the story or how Lehane had written it.  It can be very, very tricky to create a stunningly vivid world and then reveal to the reader that it really wasn’t what he or she thought it was.  An unreliable narrator is the same thing; in fact, Teddy Daniels is the unreliable POV character in the novel.

SPOILER ALERT!!! If you haven’t seen the movie or read the book, the rest of this post discusses events and issues integral to the big twist at the end…..

As he is in Scorcese’s movie.  However, I could see the foreshadowing in the movie — because I’d read the book? — and how the same details piled up to a giant mountain pointing to one thing: a brilliant and protective delusion.  The viewer watches like Chuck, Teddy’s partner, as Teddy’s thoughts become more and more paranoid and disorganized, his behavior more erratic.  We see the same details pop up in different circumstances, the same names and words, and Teddy’s reactions to them, sometimes paranoid, sometimes becoming physically ill.  His mind is intelligent but clearly wounded.  Some of the wound we see fairly quickly — he was among the American soldiers who liberated the Dachau concentration camp after WW2 ended.  We know his wife died and he dreams of her often.  He has 3 children, some of whom show up as corpses in his memories of Dachau.  He could do nothing for the children in Dachau.  His anger and frustration come out in a false memory of the Americans massacring the German guards at the camp.  But he doesn’t address his sense of powerlessness.  His paranoia increases until he finally confronts Dr. Cawley (Sir Ben Kingsley) about the alleged lobotomies and experiments occurring on Shutter Island.  But they are Teddy’s delusion, the paranoid part.  Cawley and Dr. Sheehan/Chuck (Mark Ruffalo) bring him face to face with what really occurred and his guilt and powerlessness, his true reality.

Profound guilt broke his mind.  However, his mind healed itself in a way that supported his survival by hiding away the reality so its associated pain wouldn’t overwhelm him and giving him a new reality (the delusion).  The guilt is still there but repressed, pushing at his conscious mind to be let out into the light of day.  Teddy had been traumatized three times, and each trauma’s emotional and psychological effects are added to the previous ones because he had not received any help to process and release them.  Cawley tells him that he’s been acting out the same delusion for two years, on a mental loop.  This delusion actually bears some resemblance to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder flashbacks and perhaps is related to them.  It is a coping mechanism, allowing survival but protecting against the overwhelming truth and emotion of the traumas.  Powerful emotion has an equally powerful impact on the mind.

Denial can be a powerful protector, also.  Teddy uses denial, too, threaded through the delusion.  What appears on the surface to be a conflict of one man vs. many men is actually one man vs. himself.  Scorcese shows this, I think, more clearly than Lehane in the novel.  Scorcese also can show the viewer how the people around Teddy respond to him, giving more clues to what is really going on.  Good grief…I never thought I’d ever say that I actually liked the movie better than the novel…..

Spy Swap

This past week, on a runway outside of Vienna, Austria, America traded, without intrigue or fanfare, ten Russians who pled guilty to spying for Russia for four people who had been imprisoned in Russia for spying for America .  The FBI’s assessment of the Russian spies as incompetent reduced the tension surrounding their discovery and apprehension.  These particular Russian spies had not sent any major American secrets to Moscow because they were not placed in American life to be able to make the contacts and connections necessary to obtain American secrets.  The swap for the four in Russia occurred with incredible speed and efficiency.  We may no longer be in a Cold War with Russia, but elements of that war remain.  However, whether friends or enemies, it is usually in the best interests of nations to keep an eye on what other nations are doing, especially how it relates to them. 

Espionage will never disappear.  We’ll continue to have political espionage as well as corporate, military, industrial, and economic espionage.  There are all kinds of spies. 

I watched the developments of the last few weeks with great interest.  Espionage is an element in the Perceval novels.  Writers of fiction spy on the human condition.  Researching espionage presents interesting obstacles.  I was once told that if you ask a CIA operative (agents are those people who work for CIA operatives and are ”civilians”) if he or she works for the CIA, that operative would deny it, and if he wasn’t an operative, he’d still deny it.  In fact, operatives would use deflection techniques to distract you from even thinking along those lines.  There are two kinds of political spies (in general): those with diplomatic cover and those without it.  All the Russian spies just swapped had no diplomatic cover.  They were “illegals” or NOCs (Non-Official Cover).  Because NOCS have no official or diplomatic cover, they risk far more, including their lives in some situations, than spies with diplomatic cover. 

In Perceval, one character, Bernie Brown, who will also appear in the subsequent four novels of the series, is a CIA officer with diplomatic cover.  He is the Assistant Cultural Attache at the US Embassy in Vienna.  The Cultural Attache, Bernie’s boss, is the CIA Station Chief.  (There is a joke among spies about cultural attaches at Embassies that deals with these people not sharing culture but stealing it.)  If these two characters were the only spies, my job as a writer would be relatively easy regarding research.  But there are NOCs also, not all of which are political spies.   In 2048, the geo-political landscape has changed somewhat, but not much has changed as far as espionage is concerned.  Every country has its spies in every other country.  Because America’s borders are closed in 2048, NOCs generally work also for the Commerce or Trade Councils.  As far as the Austrians are concerned, every American is a spy.  Even Evan Quinn.  Or is he?  Not likely….

Back to the recent spy swap and the ten Russian spies caught in America.  A few reports I read expressed concern for Moscow — “What were they thinking?” — and the quality of the spies they send to other countries.  If these totally incompetent Russian spies are any indication, we have nothing to worry about, concluded the reports.  I disagree.  Remember, good espionage employs the fine art of deflection.  What if those ten were the distraction so that someone else…?