We’ve all heard the injunction to “write what you know.” Well, yes and no.
If it were true, unequivocally, a female writer would have no male characters, and there would be no fantasy or historical fiction. That’s obviously not what the statement is meant to imply. While the injunction has merit in important ways—including, for example, caveats about the danger of cultural appropriation—taking it literally is far too restrictive. We’d be limited to memoir and autobiography.
Rather, we need to write from what we know—from the human truths we’ve come to understand through our own lived experience. Those truths can deepen a story. They can tell the attentive writer what her characters might feel and do, even if she’s never been part of their precise world.
As a novelist, I create characters and put them into situations that I’ve never actually experienced, yet I “know” what they’re experiencing. If I didn’t, my writing would be trite, false, or both. In my own novel, Queen of the Owls, I was able to enter the psyche of Elizabeth, the protagonist, even though I’ve never studied art history or posed nude.
I could do that because there are deeply personal experiences that I drew on and “translated” into Elizabeth’s story. They’re the garden from which I gathered the fruits and vegetables that got cooked into the novel.
To be blunt: Queen of the Owls is not a disguised memoir and I am not Elizabeth, but I couldn’t have written the book if I didn’t know what it was like to be seen as an owl, a sexless intellectual, instead of a desirable woman—as Elizabeth was, or thought she was. If my junior high school heartthrob hadn’t dismissed me with the offhand reply, “Barbara? Oh, she’s a brain.” If I hadn’t channeled the pain of soul-crushing infidelity, decades later, into writing a doctoral dissertation in record time.
Those were hard sentences to write, but without them this would be just a safe little theoretical essay, and who needs more of those?
At the same time, “write what you know” doesn’t mean using your writing for personal catharsis. My first (terrible) manuscript did just that, although I didn’t realize it at the time. I was drawing on my own painful experience of an unhappy divorce—ostensibly because that was the material I could write about most authentically, but actually because I still needed to work through the shame, humiliation, and rage.
I was writing about my experience as an admired-but-not-desired wife, rather than from my experience. I wasn’t ready to write from my experience, not yet. The pain hadn’t been digested, understood, transcended; it had only been felt.
Fast forward a couple of years, and a lot of hard inner work. Externally, I was fortunate to meet someone who thought I was the most desirable woman he’d ever seen and then, later, someone who cherished me as both mind and body. Being different as a person allowed me to be different as a writer. When I started working on Queen of the Owls—after learning more about myself and more about my craft—I was ready to let my own experiences and emotions show me how my characters would feel in their story.
What I learned, in other words, is that “writing what you know” is a two-step process. First, we take what is personal, particular to us, and search for its universal essence. Then we take that universal essence and embed it in a new particular—a character, an event, a fictional world. To put it another way, we turn our lived experience into an abstraction, and then turn that abstraction into something concrete. We put our experiences in a pot, boil them down to an essential “reduction,” and then use that “reduction” to flavor a new dish.
But that’s only half of it. Here’s the other half.
After I’d transformed my personal understanding into the motivations and events in Queen of the Owls, the relationship flipped. Just as my life had influenced the book, the book influenced my life. That is, it changed me—again.
I didn’t realize that at first, not until I began talking about Queen of the Owls in public settings—during interviews, at readings, on panels. I’d expected to feel anxious and exposed. Surely people would ask where the idea came from and whether Elizabeth was me; how could I answer without triggering all that grief and shame I’d worked so hard to transcend?
But it didn’t happen that way. What I discovered, in answering those questions rather than avoiding them, was that writing the book had freed me. It wasn’t just a matter of getting my pain on paper, putting it into words; that would have been mere catharsis. It was the act of creation itself.
Having exposed myself to the world, through my novel, there really wasn’t much left to hide. After all, anyone who’d read my book had probably figured out that I knew what it was to be married to someone whose eyes never lit up when I entered a room. I’d already outed myself. The only thing left was to embrace it. Publicly.
When I did that, daring to speak about myself as well as about Queen of the Owls, it changed me. It was an experience that went way beyond “book promotion.”
People talk about the line between fiction and life, but I don’t see it as a line any more. It’s a membrane— permeable, allowing movement in both directions.
One of my writing teachers, the wise and generous Sandra Scofield, once told me: “There’s no harvest so bountiful as one’s own pain.” The image of a harvest is a good one. Pain can be fertile soil. But the crop doesn’t consist of quasi-autobiographical accounts of that pain. It’s whatever you, as a writer, can harvest and transform through your craft.
Have there been experiences in your life that you’ve been able to “cook” into fiction? Do you think a writer of fiction can really have the objectivity to use her own life as the basis for a work of fiction? Where’s the line—or is there one—between memoir and fiction that draws on one’s own life?
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About Barbara Linn Probst
Barbara Linn Probst is a writer, blogger, former teacher and therapist, and “serious amateur” pianist living on an historic dirt road in New York’s Hudson Valley. Her debut novel QUEEN OF THE OWLS launched in April 2020 from She Writes Press--the story of a woman’s search for wholeness framed around the art and life of Georgia O’Keeffe. QUEEN OF THE OWLS has garnered stellar advance praise and will be the May 2020 selection for the Pulpwood Queens, a network of nearly 800 book clubs across the U.S. It was also named one of the most anticipated books of 2020 by Working Mother. Her second novel is slated for publication in April 2021. Before switching to fiction, Barbara published two nonfiction books and more scholarly articles than she cares to remember. She’s proudest of WHEN THE LABELS DON’T FIT (Random House, 2008), a book to help parents raise, understand, and nurture out-of-the-box children. An out-of-the-box child herself, Barbara has a PhD in Clinical Social Work and worked for many years counseling, teaching, doing qualitative research, and advocating for people with mental and emotional challenges.
Lovely essay, Barbara. I had no idea when I first put… uh, carpenter’s pencil to jobsite notebook, jotting an idea for a story, that I’d spend the next fifteen years pursuing my truth. I am a completely different person.
One of the ways I’m different is that I’m brimming with gratitude. There’s plenty, so I’m sharing some with you. Thank you.
Thanks, Vaughn. As you say, writing changes us. Who could have know, in advance, how profound those changes would be?
Barbara,
I love the idea of write from what you know. I think that is so much more spot on than writing what you know, and allows for that extension to writing what we fear most. Thank you!
I love your point about “writing what we fear,” as well as writing what we cherish. As I’m typing this, it almost seems as if the idea of writing about what we believe we “know” takes some of the life out of it. Writing on the edge of the unknown—now that’s an interesting idea! Thanks so much for your comment.
Very well said! I like the rephrasing of writing “from” what you know. And I completely agree. You make a wonderful point about how honesty about your own personal experiences helps to engage others, too.
I try to remind myself what I can bring to the writing table that younger writers don’t, which is two or three decades more of emotional experiences — pain and joy, heartache and failure and all the rest — and all that I’ve learned from it. Now, if I can only channel that effectively into my writing!
What wonderful observations! As you say, the writer’s authenticity (and, dare say, vulnerability) draws the reader in and offers a deeper experience. We don’t just want people to admire our work; we want them to experience it. And age has its merits. It can allow that “cooking time”—a long time in the oven, instead of trying to microwave our experiences right after they’ve happened (Ooo, I wish I’d thought of that image before I published the piece LOL!)
Insightful and coherent. Amazing how a preposition can grease an abstraction into useful guidance! Special thanks for using painful personal experience to powerfully illustrate the point.
I’m so glad that the piece spoke to you and felt useful. I absolutely had to use a really vulnerable experience to make the point, or else it would have struck a false note, but it’s so nice to have that acknowledged.
Your cooking analogy works well. The emotional truth is the essence with which we can flavor many dishes. I often think it’s the painful experiences that become the source of grace in our lives, how we end up blessing others through it.
It’s funny, I started writing for kids when I had my own children, and it was just something fun, a return to a childhood dream. I didn’t expect to be so completely transformed by it–marriage, motherhood, and writing drew me to Christ. I don’t even have the words for how happy I am, how grateful to be this new creation.
So beautifully expressed, Vijaya! I love your point about how the emotional truths we experience become the different flavors that the “dishes” we cook in our writing. We need all the flavors—joy, grief, shame, rage, all of them. Many thanks for this thoughtful addition to the metaphor!
Thank you for the insight, Barbara, about writing to reframe experiences.
Thanks, Deborah! I know you have much to draw upon in your own life. It was lovely to meet you in Salem!
Barbara, a beautiful post. You are always able to draw comparisons that are apt and help me see parallels in my own work. Yes, I wrote a novel after a negative experience. I think many writers have. I can still picture myself pounding out anger and hurt but also creating vibrant prose. The book never went anywhere, though there are sections in it that make me proud. Life is experience. It is ups and downs and when you are a writer–that’s where you go to look at your life and find out how to heal. You may not be Elizabeth, but you helped her come to life. I believe that writing often plays off experience–either ours or someone we know. It has a source we cannot deny.
Thanks so much, Beth. You remind me that there are different ways that our pain finds its way into prose, and for different purposes. Sometimes it’s an aspect of processing, catharsis—something we do intentionally. At other times, the emotional truth simply presents itself, while one is writing, and illuminates a fictional story. I love what you wrote: one needn’t be “Elizabeth” in order to make her come to life. So glad my essays have been helpful to you!
Wonderful piece, Barbara. Thank you for sharing and for explaining that old piece of advice in a new more meaningful way.
So glad the piece spoke to you, Lorraine. You remind me that it’s important to take a fresh look at advice that, while true, may have other aspects that one hasn’t yet explored. Thank you!
Wonderful post, Barbara. Love your description of how “we turn our lived experience into an abstraction, and then turn that abstraction into something concrete,” and especially the idea of a membrane between our fiction and private lives. Thanks so much for sharing what is certainly NOT a “safe little theoretical essay.”
Knowing that my piece spoke to you, Therese, means so much to me! That two-step process has been very helpful to me, and that “membrane” seems to operate differently in different instances. For the character whose story I’m working on now, for example, the interpenetration of my own experience is much more erratic, while it was pretty constant and central when I was creating Elizabeth. What a fascinating process we’ve given ourselves to!