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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
