Wednesday, February 6, 2013

Write What You Know

Happens to the best of us


With essays and creative writing projects coming up for people who are in English classes, the question is always "what to write about?" I've always wondered if the old adage "write what you know" is actually true.  The best place for me to look to answer this question is in the things I've written.  Most of my writings seem to end up being about gangster wars, medieval civilizations, or spy stories.  None of these are things that I am involved in, so does that make the statement “write what you know” wrong?

Reading the “Secret Life of Pronouns” (good recommendation Anh) made me believe that this statement is true.  The book is about how people use language and how language use explains who a person is and how they think. One of the interactive tests in the book is it gives you a picture and tells you to write a story about it.  Then based on your word choice, it can discern your attitude towards the image, what your stance is in the situation, and a reflection of yourself in your story.  Since the pictures are vague and you have to write a story, you naturally use snippets of your own life and thoughts to construct it.  That doesn’t mean that the story is 100% your life, but your experiences are involved.  So maybe “write what you know” is true in an indirect sense.

Example of one of the vague images
Why am I thinking about this now? Well I’m sitting in Shea thinking about how I have my Japanese lit class in 25 min.  In that class, we are reading novels written by Ryuunosuke Akutagawa.  Unlike other novelists of his time like Soseki, he didn’t want to fully expose his life and lay it bare for his readers.  Instead he wanted to express his inner turmoil through the fictional stories of others; the fictional writings he created contrasted previous semi-autobiographical writings.  That way he wrote what he knew, but with the detachment he desired. 
Man was a short story genius
Went off on a tangent there but it is part of the point I wanted to make.  Even when I wrote those stories of events I’ve never seen and worlds I’ve never been, each story has a part of my own experience in it which, even if it may not have a direct part of the story, influences the entire tale.  It is said that ideas cannot come from nowhere but have some origin as we think with this crazy brain of ours.  Maybe humans can ONLY write what they know if that thought that ideas have to come from somewhere is true.  May not make writing essays and stories easier, but it is comforting to know that all we really need is already in our brains.