Track Changes

For a long time I thought I wanted to be a writer. It is something I enjoy doing. I do it, in one form or another, everyday.

At university I wrote short stories nobody read for the student magazine. Every summer I tried to write a novel. Nothing ever came out. I grew frustrated. I thought to be a writer I needed to be writing books or screenplays or films. I looked at Felix and Sam and Tom and Jan and I felt like a failure.

They were all writing and publishing books. And I sold out to a corporate job.

At night, I would read about Hollywood screenwriters who wrote screenplays and novels in their teens and early twenties and wonder “when will I be able to do that?”

But reading what I had written confirmed I’m not a journalist or a novelist. I’m closer to an editor or a teacher. And I realise now that is ok. I write to try an make sense of the world. To create something I need to understand it better.

A cliched piece of writing advice is to “write what you know,” but really, this is terrible advice. The late, great John Gardner tells us:

Nothing can be more limiting to the imagination, nothing is quicker to turn on the psyche’s censoring devices and distortion systems, than trying to write truthfully and interestingly about one’s own home town, one’s Episcopalian mother, one’s crippled younger sister. For some writers, the advice may work, but when it does, it usually works by a curious accident: The writer writes well about what he knows because he has read primarily fiction of this kind–realistic fiction of the sort we associate with The New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, or Harper’s. The writer, in other words, is presenting not so much what he knows about life as what he knows about a particular literary genre. A better answer, though still not an ideal one, might have been “Write the kind of story you know and like best–a ghost story, a science-fiction piece, a realistic story about your childhood, or whatever.”

Though the fact is not always obvious at a glance when we look at works of art very close to us in time, the artist’s primary unit of thought–his primary conscious or unconscious basis for selecting and organizing the details of his work–is genre.”

Not write what you know. Write what you like.