The phrase ‘write what you know’ is heard so often that it has become little more than a platitude. This isn’t to say that it is necessarily bad advice; as trite as it may sound there is surely some wisdom in telling someone faced with a blank piece of paper (or word document) to write what you know. However, there’s a danger, like any advice or rule, that one forgets that advice is often there to be ignored and rules there to be broken.
The author Nathan Englander talks about this idea of ‘writing what you know’ in an interview for bigthink.com. For Englander, ‘write what you know’ is the ‘most misunderstood piece of good advice ever.’ Englander explains how growing up in suburban New York the idea of writing what you know frightened him. For Englander, this idea was a straitjacket, something that separated him from the world of letters and creative writing. Stuck in suburban New York, the idea of writing what you knew seemed impossible, or at least to Englander’s young mind, to a rather banal, and ultimately pointless sort of writing. Of course, as Englander notes, this isn’t what is meant by the phrase. A writer isn’t obliged to write in some vaguely autobiographical fashion (although of course they can; Bukowski forged a pretty successful career out of it) but instead, Englander claims, when someone tells you to ‘write what you know’, what they really mean is that your writing should have its origins in an immediate emotional and empathetic sense.
This might be patently obvious when talking about fiction, as Englander is. Fiction is, by definition, writing what you don’t know, writing something that didn’t happen; the fiction writer ‘makes something up.’ However, the problem with the idea of ‘writing what you know’ becomes more pronounced when it infiltrates into other kinds of writing, becoming the predominant idea of what writing is and what it is for. In journalism, for example, there is the increasing emergence of writers and who place themselves at the centre of their work. Of course, many might be quick to point out that this is nothing new, something to which the emergence of gonzo and New Journalism, in the sixties and seventies testifies. And, moreover, I do not wish to simply suggest that such strategies for writing in a journalistic context are heretical, somehow indicative of the increasing decline of western civilization. I am not arguing for some return to objectivity – indeed the dismantling of the notion of objectivity in an area such as journalism was something liberating, part of the zeitgeist that sought to disrupt traditional authorities, rendering writing and information something that is more free, maybe even more democratic. The only problem is when this liberation is surrendered in favour of the inane and the narcissistic. Writing with an acute sense of one’s position as a writer, of the impossibility of objectivity is something worth holding on to, not only ethically, but also because it makes for interesting writing, and promotes certain individuality on the part of the writer. However, this can mutate into something else, whereby the injunction to ‘write what you know’ becomes more like an injunction to narcissism and self-obsession rather than useful advice to a writer.
The increasingly self-regarding nature of writing, or more specifically perhaps we should say the increasing visibility of narcissistic writing, that lamely fetishises the ‘write what you know’ dictum – could be linked to the internet. Social media creates a platform from which anyone can speak on any subject, imploring people to speak or to ‘share.’ This is not intrinsically A Bad Thing, but it would seem that that subject is all too frequently themselves. Can we conclude from this that when people are left to their own devices (in all senses of the term), they will inevitably fall into an extroverted form of navel-gazing? Perhaps. But what is more interesting is the paradox that people choose to write about themselves all the while doing using a tool which gives them a whole wealth of information at our disposal. A good question to ask would be whether there are fewer polymaths now, with the vast territories of information sprawling across the weird space of the net, than there were centuries ago, when information was compressed tightly within universities and libraries, accessible only to a select few? In a time when it is so easy to find things you don’t know, it would seem that the most popular things on the internet are ways of interacting with what is familiar, or creating a sense of familiarity in our online world.
The site ThoughtCatalog, a ‘webjournal’ aimed at angsty late teen and twentysomethings, is almost an exercise in creating a website that revolves around narcissism. Its articles are often about the writer’s personal experiences and feelings – relationship woes etc., or are sometimes pieces that are aimed at the reader – ‘What your Internet Browser Says About You.’ In fact, these articles that are aimed directly at the reader, with the third person pronoun in their title are often the most insidious, as they try to establish and forge a certain demographic in its own image, as if to ensure that the reader leaves the article thinking ‘yes, that’s me!’ Perhaps I am being somewhat cynical here – after all, the writers for ThoughtCatalog aren’t ad men, but are people not dissimilar to me – people just wanting to write and find some sense of identity for themselves. Yet what is so strange and unsettling is that there is this similarity between the articles on ThoughtCatalog and marketing/SEO type copy, which does little to make the reader think about a specific issue, but is instead simply trying to get the reader’s attention. A large proportion of its comments are variations on ‘wow I can really relate to this right now.’ Writing that is ‘relatable’ is not necessarily bad, but when it is the raison d’etre of your webjournal, there is a problem. Time Magazine featured a very good piece on ThoughtCatalog, which has given me a lot of my material here, but in particular there is a particularly good quote, from Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan. Nolan notes that ‘writing about something ten million other people have experienced isn’t just irritating but dangerous, because it promotes the idea that the only way to build a career is to write about yourself.’ (A more recent article by Nolan seeks to underline his point further) The implication would seem to be, perhaps, that one should not write what one knows, but instead one should try and look farther afield, challenging oneself and one’s readers. Get out of your comfort zone and all that.
Taking aim at ThoughtCatalog might be a little easy, and perhaps the site is just symptomatic of a general introspection of youth, a group of people who face anxieties about the future and feel as though they are in a continual state of transition. And of course, as I’ve already tried to assert, being able to write about yourself and your experiences can be a liberating thing. The problem is when one fails to realise the problems that writing about yourself raises, and all that remains is a pointless and aimless narcissism.
However, although it would seem that writing what you know is something that pervades non-fiction writing, as the example of Thoughtcatalog, as well as countless personal blogs, and even columns in widely read newspapers, attests to, we might also turn back to where we started, and question whether the problem of writing what you know is something that is in fiction writing. I am thinking here particularly of film and television, most notably HBO’s critically acclaimed series Girls. The series focuses on the life of a twentysomething (always the twentysomethings it seems…) and her friend as she tries to navigate her post-college life in New York. Clearly the series has autobiographical elements, and was based on the experiences of the show’s creator Lena Dunham. Although the show has garnered a great deal of praise, it has also come in for a lot of criticism, particularly concerning the particularly ‘white’ make up of the cast. Dunham hasn’t dismissed such criticism, but has merely said that the ethnic make up of her show isn’t something she noticed. Effectively her defence was that she was writing what she knew – the predominantly white, middle class Manhattan world that she had grown up in.
I view these criticisms in two ways – on the one hand, criticising Dunham for an underrepresentation of other ethnicities seemed misplaced. Surely she has a perfect right to write her own experiences? If there is a marginalisation of ethnic minorities on US television that is not Dunham’s fault, but rather the wider television culture, the responsibility lying with network executives rather than a young writer. The New Yorker’s theatre critic Hilton Als makes an interesting point that bears further consideration, when he asks: ‘isn’t Dunham doing women of color a favour by not trying to insert them into her world where ideas about child-rearing, let alone man and class aspirations tend to be different?’ Notwithstanding the point about the cultural differences between black and white women (although the differences between the US and the UK might be important here), Als point seems to largely be about shoehorning in black characters, about lazy tokenism. This lazy tokenism, I would argue (and, I think, Als would too) is not representational or empowering but reductive and ultimately pointless.
However, my second view on these criticisms largely stems from Dunham’s response to them, and the general point that I’m trying to make (and have been slowly winding my way around). Although on the one hand I’d want to defend Dunham’s write to write precisely what she knows, to articulate and express her experiences, however privileged or ‘white’ they might be, on the other hand I’d want to ask why she would write what she knows. After all, shouldn’t writing stories involve some sort of imagination or creation, a willingness to engage with something alien or unknown? Shoehorning black characters into your TV show certainly isn’t this, but then writing a vaguely autobiographical script about how difficult life was when you left college was isn’t stretching your imagination or creative skills either. It would be great to see Dunham put her obvious talent to the test and stretch herself (I don’t mean writing an episode of Game of Thrones. Although…)
Perhaps the best advice to a writer isn’t write what you know, but instead write what you don’t know. This doesn’t mean that ill-informed writing on any old subject is to be encouraged, but rather that when writing, whether fiction or non-fiction, there is much to be said for trying to focus on the strange and the difficult, for finding something new and novel. And this isn’t to say that one can’t write well and write what you know; only that if you are writing what you know, that ‘what you know’ should be held under question and interrogation, treated as if you don’t know it, made to appear strange, not something self-evident. Ultimately, writing should be uncomfortable.
Cryptic Murmurs 