Write What You Know?

"Write what you know."  That's advice given by writing teachers and writers the world over.  Fair enough; it's easier to write characters that think like us, that talk like us, that act like us.  It's easier to write about experiences we ourselves have had.  Why do you think so many of Stephen King's heroes are writers?  But I think there's something more to it than that.  It's possible to go deeper, to dive under the surface.

Back when I was in 10th Grade, I wrote a poem that I shared with my English class.  It was about a lower-class guy, very poor, living in a dirty, unfurnished room in the middle of a big, dark, anonymous city.  It was written first person.  I read it out loud to the class.

They hated it.  The common refrain was, "You can't write about a guy like that.  He's nothing like you.  You've never experienced it.  How dare you?"  That stung a lot.  After all, we'd just gotten done reading a book in which the main character commits suicide at the end, and they hadn't complained about that, though it's pretty unlikely that author knew what it was like to kill herself.  One of my friends told me to shrug it off, saying, "If they don't know a metaphor when they see it, that's their problem."

He'd understood what I was trying to do better than I had myself.  What I was really trying to get at was the feeling of intense loneliness and isolation I was beginning to feel.  The window-dressing of the poem was the dirty urban environment, but what I was trying to get at was how it felt to me to be in that classroom, ironically, with people who didn't understand me.  Overwrought adolescent angst?  Probably a bit.  But it was also a prelude to a bout of severe acute depression that hit me just a few months later.  And depression was something I understood very, very well.

I think the idea of using metaphor and symbol to get at an underlying truth is very important to the fantasy genre.  Obviously, none of us have experience with dragons, monsters, desperate swordfights, and sorcery.  But these are the symbols, the language of fantasy.  As far back as Beowulf, tellers of fantasy stories have understood that a dragon, by itself, isn't really anything.  But Beowulf's dragon is symbolic of greed, of hoarded wealth, and of a lot of other things I don't know enough Old English to understand.  The flames it breathes out, its claws and armored scales, represent the hero's greatest challenge--but it's a challenge that can translate to everyday life, where the biggest lizards we're likely to see live in terrariums or the zoo.

In Ember of Dreams, one of the characters compliments another on his courage.  He tells him, "You have warred with difficult foes... Few men have the courage to face themselves so honestly."  This, in the end, is what fantasy storytelling, indeed all storytelling, is about.  Fantasy is about inner conflicts writ large on the fabric of an imaginary world.  I couldn't take a sword and carve the depression out of me (though some people try, resulting in tragedy).  But I could write a story in which strength of heart can truly overwhelm monsters of hate, rage, and evil.

I'm not that old or experienced in life, though every day and every year adds to my store of experiences.  But I can still write what I know.  I've noticed that a lot of my heroes are craftsmen, people who create things of beauty.  This reflects my own hope that what I create can be beautiful and true.  Some of my own experiences find their way into my writing: the too-serious, painfully earnest apprentice Robert in Ember has more than a little of my own adolescence showing through, and Luthor's weakness in the face of temptation is something I've struggled with in myself.