November 3rd, 2010 / 10:45 pm
Snippets
Snippets
Sean Lovelace—
“Write what you know” is the worst variety of bullshit.
-
Archives
- January 2023
- February 2022
- September 2021
- February 2021
- January 2021
- December 2020
- November 2020
- October 2020
- September 2020
- August 2020
- August 2017
- July 2017
- May 2017
- April 2017
- March 2017
- February 2017
- January 2017
- December 2016
- November 2016
- October 2016
- October 2014
- September 2014
- August 2014
- July 2014
- June 2014
- May 2014
- April 2014
- March 2014
- February 2014
- January 2014
- December 2013
- November 2013
- October 2013
- September 2013
- August 2013
- July 2013
- June 2013
- May 2013
- April 2013
- March 2013
- February 2013
- January 2013
- December 2012
- November 2012
- October 2012
- September 2012
- August 2012
- July 2012
- June 2012
- May 2012
- April 2012
- March 2012
- February 2012
- January 2012
- December 2011
- November 2011
- October 2011
- September 2011
- August 2011
- July 2011
- June 2011
- May 2011
- April 2011
- March 2011
- February 2011
- January 2011
- December 2010
- November 2010
- October 2010
- September 2010
- August 2010
- July 2010
- June 2010
- May 2010
- April 2010
- March 2010
- February 2010
- January 2010
- December 2009
- November 2009
- October 2009
- September 2009
- August 2009
- July 2009
- June 2009
- May 2009
- April 2009
- March 2009
- February 2009
- January 2009
- December 2008
- November 2008
- October 2008
- September 2008
-
Meta
“Write about what you don’t know about you know”-Eudora Welty
I think the “write what you know” advice is good for young writers who don’t trust that they can discover things about what they “know.” It’s also good advice because they often write about what they think they know about what they don’t know when they bring some story to a workshop that follows the conventions of a TV sitcom, or is set on Mars, or involves a werewolf protagonist.
I don’t think it’s bullshit, actually. I think the notion that we should only write what we know is shortsighted because we don’t know all that much, relatively speaking but I do believe it’s a good place to start from as we learn to develop our imaginations and our ability to translate what we imagine into stories people want to read. It’s very easy to demean the writing advice that is doled out to novices but the whole purpose of that advice is to help people get started. Of course it feels like bullshit to an experienced writer but to a novice writer, at least when I think of my own early writing, that advice, which I received in high school, was invaluable. It was a place to start and without first writing what I know, I would have never gotten to a place where now, I can write about anything whether I know it or not.
Write that you don’t know.
“Write about what you don’t know about you know”-Eudora Welty
I think the “write what you know” advice is good for young writers who don’t trust that they can discover things about what they “know.” It’s also good advice because they often write about what they think they know about what they don’t know when they bring some story to a workshop that follows the conventions of a TV sitcom, or is set on Mars, or involves a werewolf protagonist.
Whatever dude. Your chapbook about a guy who blogs snippets was great.
Did you just write you what you know or do you not know about writing what you know being bullshit? What does it mean to know something? How could one write something if one did not know it?
I don’t think it’s bullshit, actually. I think the notion that we should only write what we know is shortsighted because we don’t know all that much, relatively speaking but I do believe it’s a good place to start from as we learn to develop our imaginations and our ability to translate what we imagine into stories people want to read. It’s very easy to demean the writing advice that is doled out to novices but the whole purpose of that advice is to help people get started. Of course it feels like bullshit to an experienced writer but to a novice writer, at least when I think of my own early writing, that advice, which I received in high school, was invaluable. It was a place to start and without first writing what I know, I would have never gotten to a place where now, I can write about anything whether I know it or not.
“some writing cliche plus ‘is bullshit'” is the worst variety of blog post.
Write that you don’t know.
“Show, don’t tell” is bullshit.
“Find your voice” is bullshit.
“Use strong verbs” is bullshit.
“Murder your darlings” is bullshit.
“Writing is rewriting” is bullshit.
I think “Write to find out what you know” is more appropriate. I like this E.M. Forster quote: “How can I know what I think till I see what I say?”.
I don’t mean to pick a fight, but one-liners that play on the form of one-liner blog posts in order to insult them are pretty trite, too.
So, it’s implied, to write about something you have to get to know it first.
Write what you don’t know yet.
Write what you want.
Part of the problem is the way one-liner advice is presented, like it’s the only option, as opposed to being more like, hey this is one way to do X. I had the opposite experience as Roxane, in that I heard “write what you know” early on and took that to mean I didn’t have much hope of being a writer and so it was totally liberating to learn that you could in fact write what you didn’t know. But we have a way of talking about the known and unknown like they’re two totally separate entities, which doesn’t seem accurate. No matter how present the “what we don’t know” is, what we know, think we know, don’t know that we know is usually in the mix as well, or at least it is for me.
Just write or don’t. Write or light your hair on fire. Write and hopefully, eventually you’ll do it well.
I wonder what Descartes would think of this.
My Intro to Creative Writing professor always said: Write what you love or what you fear. I think that’s better advice.
Eli: I never agreed with “Murder your darlings,” but I fucking love the phrase itself.
I don’t mean to pick a fight, but trolling is pretty trite, too.
Mierda del toro is ‘bullshit’.
skata tou taurou
ScheiBen Bullen
merde des taureaux
I don’t yet know that I’m not as smart as I think I am.
Lucky for me as a reader, there’s almost always someone who doesn’t yet know that about me.
nice. clever-ish.
Agree. The problem is in the presentation of the advice, more than the advice itself. The advice is well-meaning, but needs to be explained more clearly to students.
Again, as I posted earlier on the thread, too many young writers don’t have the confidence to trust “what they know” to get at what they don’t know about what they know. So, for instance, a young student in workshop will try to write stories about vampires on Mars because he thinks his background in Middle, Ohio is boring and uninteresting, that he already knows everything about that place and its people, and that it would be more interesting to write a story about an insane werewolf who eats college coeds. The advice is meant to steer young writers away from relying on “what they don’t know” as a crutch to avoid what they don’t know about what they know. This is why so many undergrad stories read like TV sitcoms, Hollywood scripts, or use genre conventions at the expense of character development.
Am I the only one whose first association when they hear this phrase is always fucking Jo March?
That should be a reality TV show: Fucking Jo March.
These pithily-worded lines of advice would probably work better with the full stop replaced by a question mark, delivered with a look of anxious uncertainty and a Ginsberg shrug.
Sean, what about “write what you know” do you think is bullshit?
Ray Bradbury living on Mars.
He didn’t shrug.
He would think, “Get out of my shade.”
your misuse of the cliche is just as bad as the cliche though.
you don’t tell people who are confident in their writing to “write about shit you know.”
Ever.
I was thinking of this photograph: http://www.obit-mag.com/media/image/allen_ginsbergFlower.jpg
Actually, maybe they should just be delivered by that photograph as a whole.
well, it’s a forum, dean. it is fucking Aristotelian. i put “snippets” up to spark conversation.
write what you know is true and not true. it is so general as to be ignorant and profound.
i could have said, “Drink.” good advice until it is not.
so.
Ray Bradbury isn’t an 18 year old kid.
Agreed. “Murder your darlings” is the sort of advice you give people because it’s fun to say (/watch?).
“The man didn’t shrug!” sounds like a particularly good line from Achewood.
I like fiction based on research/astral projection. To escape the self. Most 18 year olds DO write what they know and it is profoundly predictable. And contained (in their Tweets, once called a journal).
A great CW class would be to actually force an 18 year old writer to NEVER write about their own selves,
They would be in a wilderness. A new wilderness.
It would be a vision-quest.
much of this is metaphor, but still so.
Well that is such a shrug it is obviously not meant as shrug.
That’s like mooning the moon.
Shit man I haven’t read it in a while but this sounds a lot like what I remember from Natalie Goldberg though.
OK, but Goldberg is like sit and let some “thing” flow. I feel her vision is actually still about the self. Isn’t her book “write what you feel while mediatate, etc.”
I’m thinking of write from persona.
Write a profile of another.
Write a hard news article as fiction.
Write as a bolt. Of lead.
There are actual exercises to make you not write about I.
Possibly useless, but possibly OK if you are 18.
It seems like you’re misrepresenting the advice. I don’t think “write what you know” means to simply, “write about your experiences” or “self”: it just means to write about something you “know” in order to discover it because–again–many kids write about what they don’t know to avoid any kind of discovery at all. Also, why in the world would you ask a beginning writer who is probably under-read and has little to no confidence to conduct left-brained research before writing? That sounds like a recipe for disaster, not to mention paralysis. We’re talking about students who haven’t read many short stories, and don’t possess the confidence of experienced writers. We’re talking about students who are more likely to interpret, “write what you don’t know,” as, “write about a bunch of cool shit that would make a bodaciously narly movie or television drama, cool shit with melodramatic and gratuitous violence like a male, teen werewolf who eat coeds who put him in the friend-zone, or, on the other end of the spectrum, a sweet, precious puppy-dog-and-butterfly-rainbow boy meets girl, medieval fantasy that involves dragon-slaying and swooning.”
And while many of the stories might appear more “realistic” on the surface–i.e. the college break-up story set on a Midwestern campus written in dull prose–the kid writer will still usually heap a bunch of melodramatic, cliched, or TV sitcom/drama/after-school-special-devices onto the story that will prevent him from having to do any work–that will prevent him from discovering anything about what he knows. “Writing what you know” goes way beyond the mere setting of a story, or the writer’s personal experiences.
Right, that’s better, but she does tell you “forget yourself,” i.e. disappear into what you’re writing about, become an animal, write in different places, mess with syntax. It’s a new-agey spin, no doubt. Yours is more hard-nosed. But I feel like the advice wouldn’t wind up being vastly different. And that’s what I was getting at…that it’s not a book that will send you astray when you’re starting out. Unless, of course, as in Kyle’s original post, you’re glutting yourself on writing guides instead of what you should be, literature.
I feel people–any people age 18-21–should ONLY write that they know. These 2 categories:
1. Hobby. Jargon, words, talk, energy, anecdotes, verve, why? (r u into this), nerd-age, we learn as we read, useful compartmentalization, all of it. Write your hobby. And hobby is a double-b light tone term, but I mean avocation, labor or love. What you are IN To.
2. Job. Even better. Appearance/reality split. Drugs, sex, politically incorrect making out by dumpster, age weird thing, $$$$, is this how the world works? (or does not?) yes. JOB. work
I would seriously like ALL students to write about work or hobby for 3-4 years, period.
I am serious.
After that read poetry for 2.5 years then write a story.
This is what I authentically feel on this topic.
I r done
A locus classicus for the Hermeneutic Circularity of Understanding
Socrates: For it is not that, having resources myself, I cause others to be at a loss, but rather, being at a loss more than everyone else myself, I cause others also to be at a loss. And now concerning [X]: as to what it is, I do not know, while you perhaps knew before you came into contact with me, but now you are similar to me in not knowing. However, I want, with you, to look into and investigate whatever it is.
Meno: And by what means will you, Socrates, inquire into this thing about which you don’t know anything at all concerning what it is? For into what sort of thing, of which you know nothing, will you inquire? Or, if you ever happen upon it, how will you know that this thing is the thing you do not know?
Socrates: I realize what sort of thing you want to say, Meno. Do you see this as a merely polemical argument you are introducing – that it’s impossible for a person to inquire into either what one knows or what one doesn’t know? For one would not inquire into what one knows, because one knows it and there’s no need of this inquiry for such a person. What one does not know, one does not know what to inquire into.
—The Meno, 80c-e
thank god your teacher instincts kicked in because i had no idea this was a forum. thank you.
i’m with you, i don’t like the statement much.
but saying there is no utility in it is fucking silly. come on.
some people need encouragement.
i support this.
“little women” was my first live-action film. i loved it