What You Don’t Know About Writing What You Know

About a year ago, I received an email from a college-going complete stranger on MySpace who had been recommended my first book, The Other Side of What, because a friend of his thought the storyline of the lead character sounded a bit too much like his own life. We corresponded very briefly, and while I was flattered, I hopefully convinced him that the book was not based on any events in his life because (1) I had never met this person and (2) We established I wrote the majority of the book before those certain events in his life had even taken place. I think he was disappointed.

I did admit in my very first signing for this book that the characters were all based on real people, despite the disclaimer on the copyright page saying “any resemblance to real people is completely coincidental,” but the events that take place in the book were – and still are – all fictional.  That being said, two of those people were in the room at the time I announced this, were already aware of this fact before I said it, and also happened to be two close friends of mine who knew I was going to base a character on them some day.  One such friend, who was not present at the signing, actually asked to be in my first book and told me what she wanted her name to be.  I granted her wish!  However, this MySpace stranger who emailed out of concern was not present at this event.  And as I said, I had never met him before, nor after receiving his email.

This humorous tale is not really the reason behind this post, but it raises the question of how much of our true selves or true lives do we put into a story.  It’s all very interesting to ponder the lines between fact and fiction and when and where they become blurred, and what gives readers reasons to think that what they are reading must be based on something true, especially when they happen to know the author.

Those who know me and know my background will certainly recognize specific settings in my books because I tend to use actual places, often businesses where I worked or hang outs I frequented in college. Many know that a park that plays a crucial part in The Other Side of What was based on a photograph I bought at an imports store and which hangs in my dining room still today. Zoe’s store is based on a conversation that a friend and I had often, dreaming of a business we’d open together to cater to artists.  I even used the name we called it: Hands Across the Board. Many people have emailed me over the years to ask if Red Square was indeed the bar that hosted 80s night on Wednesdays where they had danced the night away in college to remixes of Cyndi Lauper or the Safety Dance.  C’mon folks!  That’s an easy one.  I used the old club’s real name and exact description.

Those who have read Stealing Wishes, my second book, often ask me if I’m obsessive compulsive because my main character is.  I admit Blaine and I do have a lot in common: photography enthusiast, coffee shop background, Isherwood fan, sense of humor.  We’ve both broken hearts and had ours broken. And maybe I am a tad bit OCD – not to the extent Blaine is (I don’t sync everything in my life to the number 32), but I am definitely NOT Blaine.

Fellow author R. J. Keller says the same thing about her lead character, in a post on her blog from about a year ago, so aptly titled “I Am Not Tess Dyer.” R. J. says…

Tess and I share some similarities: eye color, short stature, a tendency towards being a smart ass. We’re both avid Red Sox fans and both live in Small Town, Maine. I used my own ‘voice’–so to speak–for the narration. (Tackling the task of writing a first novel was much less daunting that way.) But the actual events of her life were in no way taken from mine. I sat down to write WFS over two-and-a-half-years ago with absolutely no plot in mind. I had no specific axes to grind, no confessions to make, no burdens with anyone’s name stamped in big, block letters to set down. Just thirty-five-and-a-half years of being a human being to sort through and a certainty that I had the talent to make something out of it… So, although I can say that the novel is not factually autobiographical, I will admit that it is, perhaps, emotionally autobiographical. Still…I am not Tess Dyer.

I have always said writing is lonely.  It’s also personal. I’m reminded of a quote from an old retail regional manager I used to report to who said, “Fake it till you can make it!”  This quote was used in reference to being able to spit out your hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly figures such as credit card percentages and conversion rates (all that mumbo jumbo that retailers track and report to stock holders because it sounds important) to your district manager, who already knows your figures anyway but just wants to make you sweat a little.

I think we can apply it to writing as well.  No one has to know we have no idea what we are talking about.  We are writers after all and we are telling a story.  Use your imagination!  Make it up! Be creative! Many authors, including the best selling Dan Brown, create our characters based on our own fantasies or dreams.  Our characters are the perfection we have yet to reach, nor probably ever will. Still, many of us tend to write what we know about just to be safe, and there’s nothing wrong with that either.  While writing, I tend to stop and ask myself, “What will my friends and family think when they read this?”  And then I throw in something off the wall and totally bizarre just to really make them think, “Could this be true? Is this Shannon?” But it’s not just friends and family we are usually writing for, so it is interesting to wonder what makes a complete stranger connect themselves or the author (a complete stranger to them) to something they are reading.

Author Mark Zero and I recently discussed this in an email.  He said…

I imagine lots of people mistake you for Blaine just because it’s easiest for people to understand fiction in terms of authorial biography, especially first-person fiction. I get that sometimes, too, people trying to guess which of the characters in my books is me. I was at a Book Club party for one of my books, The French Art of Stealing–the main character is a Hitchcockian hero, an innocent man trapped by circumstances in a mystery not of his own making–and I could sense a palpable disappointment among the club members that I wasn’t more like my narrator. The narrator, it’s true, is a war photographer, with a very worldly bravado and lots of experience of harrowing situations in exotic locales, so I understand why they might have been disappointed to get me instead…

Here’s a line also from Mark, from the same email, which I’ve committed to memory because it’s quite brilliant…

…maybe that’s what people want, something concrete they can know, instead of veils of fictive distance.

And that’s why there are nonfiction writers, reporters, and journalists that will give it to them, right? Wrong! We all know that not even the news is concrete fact these days.  The television shows us only what they want us to see, and how do we know it’s not from a swayed point of view?  A certain book called Lies My Teacher Told Me seems to come to mind!  But we’re talking about fiction here.

And I think that’s why I find myself enjoying historical fiction a lot lately.  I like to be entertained with a fictional story that I don’t know anything about, but like it even more when a character or event I do know pops up in the middle of the plot.  Suddenly, the writer and the reader share a connection. In Joel Rose’s The Blackest Bird, we meet up with celebrated author Edgar Allan Poe.  Kim Powers wrote of Harper Lee and Truman Capote in the beautiful Capote in Kansas, displaying several conversations between the two mysterious writers that may or may not have happened in real life. Michael Cunningham used Virginia Wolf in The Hours to set a certain mood and craft part of the story (still one of my favorite books to this day).

Historians probably snub their noses at fiction like this because an author doesn’t necessarily preserve the character of the figure they are writing about, but the key word here is “character.”  Such writing, and use of real people as characters in fiction, serves an entirely different purpose.  Maybe the author feels a certain connection.  Maybe that person is their muse.  Or maybe the author wants to give the reader someone else to connect to for a while.  Sure, I knew who Virginia Wolf was long before I read The Hours.  I did wonder if what Cunningham wrote was true or not, but in the end I didn’t care so much.  All I knew was how the book made me feel when I turned the last page, and that is probably the magic Cunningham cares more about.

Even when an author writes themselves into their story, whose to say we are always going to tell the truth?  Guess what?  We don’t have to!  Even though we may use the traits of ourselves or the threads of lives we’ve witnessed, and whether we stay true to them or not is entirely up to us.  I’ve spent a great deal of time “writing what I know,” and I find that as I age as a writer, I know more.  Does that give me more things to write about?  Absolutely.  But going back to historical fiction, despite History never being a favorite subject of mine, I’ve recently found myself intrigued by a certain tragic event that never graced the pages of our textbooks.  It was a real event that fell to the back pages of the newspapers, buried by stories of a war coming to an end and the death of a president. Readers, already numb from tales of death and destruction, skipped over the news and while a few historians have retold the story, it’s also somehow become fodder in my head for a few characters (there’s that word again) that have a story to tell.

So, in my case, what do you do when you want to write about something you know nothing about.  First, avoid that phrase about writing what you know, and go out and learn about it.  Sure, you can’t go back in time and witness that day and time for yourself, but you don’t have to.  That’s what a writer’s imagination is for.  Let your ink pen to paper or fingers on the keyboard breathe life into the story, taking both you and the readers back. Embellish if you want.  Or stay true to the facts.  But either way, put a little of yourself in the story. It might be the color of your hero’s eyes, or the name of  the leading couples’ baby, or the way the villain walks, or maybe it all takes place on the street you grew up on.  Make it personal, if not for anyone but yourself.

Going back to Mark’s quote, close the “fictive distance” between you and the reader. And let your readers wonder… Is that me they are writing about?