November 3rd, 2010 / 10:45 pm
Snippets

“Write what you know” is the worst variety of bullshit.

50 Comments

  1. MFBomb

      “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.

  2. Roxane

      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.

  3. Ted

      Write that you don’t know.

  4. Guest

      “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.

  5. Guest

      Whatever dude. Your chapbook about a guy who blogs snippets was great.

  6. letters journal

      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?

  7. Roxane

      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.

  8. aaron

      “some writing cliche plus ‘is bullshit'” is the worst variety of blog post.

  9. Ted

      Write that you don’t know.

  10. Ethan

      “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.

  11. ryssiebee

      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?”.

  12. Trey

      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.

  13. keedee

      So, it’s implied, to write about something you have to get to know it first.

  14. Donald

      Write what you don’t know yet.

  15. Joseph Riippi

      Write what you want.

  16. Laura

      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.

  17. Jhon

      Just write or don’t. Write or light your hair on fire. Write and hopefully, eventually you’ll do it well.

  18. christopher.

      I wonder what Descartes would think of this.

  19. Dawn.

      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.

  20. Monch

      I don’t mean to pick a fight, but trolling is pretty trite, too.

  21. deadgod

      Mierda del toro is ‘bullshit’.

  22. deadgod

      skata tou taurou

      ScheiBen Bullen

      merde des taureaux

  23. deadgod

      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.

  24. Trey

      nice. clever-ish.

  25. Guest

      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.

  26. Tim Jones-Yelvington

      Am I the only one whose first association when they hear this phrase is always fucking Jo March?

  27. Amber

      That should be a reality TV show: Fucking Jo March.

  28. Donald

      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.

  29. jereme_dean

      Sean, what about “write what you know” do you think is bullshit?

  30. Sean

      Ray Bradbury living on Mars.

  31. Sean

      He didn’t shrug.

  32. Sean

      He would think, “Get out of my shade.”

  33. jereme_dean

      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.”

  34. Donald
  35. Donald

      Actually, maybe they should just be delivered by that photograph as a whole.

  36. Sean

      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.

  37. Guest

      Ray Bradbury isn’t an 18 year old kid.

  38. Tadd Adcox

      Agreed. “Murder your darlings” is the sort of advice you give people because it’s fun to say (/watch?).

  39. Tadd Adcox

      “The man didn’t shrug!” sounds like a particularly good line from Achewood.

  40. Sean

      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.

  41. Sean

      Well that is such a shrug it is obviously not meant as shrug.

      That’s like mooning the moon.

  42. Tim Horvath

      Shit man I haven’t read it in a while but this sounds a lot like what I remember from Natalie Goldberg though.

  43. Sean

      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.

  44. Guest

      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.

  45. Tim Horvath

      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.

  46. Sean

      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

  47. deadgod

      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

  48. jereme_dean

      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.

  49. jereme_dean

      i support this.

  50. stephen

      “little women” was my first live-action film. i loved it