Writing What You Know

It is inarguably the number one cliché of creative writing classes “Write what you know.”

In my professional career as a video game designer, I’ve written about three hundred sword and sorcery fantasy stories, dialogue from postapocalyptic soldiers, storylines from the perspective of giant robots that turn into cars, and conversations between 18th century pirates. In my semi-professional career as a screenwriter, I’ve written a dozen scripts where people are dealing with ghosts, serial killers, monsters, and saving the world with super powers. In my burgeoning career as a novelist, I, a 39-year-old man living in Los Angeles am, naturally enough, writing the story of a 82-year-old woman living in the fictional town of Athelstan, Ohio.

Why can’t I just write about me?

Thankfully my life isn’t dramatic enough to make a good story. To be entertaining you have to have conflict on every page of a novel, screenplay, or video game script. At best, my life would be a sitcom of the old-fashioned variety, with minor hassles that need to be dealt with and then everything is tied up neatly in 23 minutes including subplots and some pointless but funny scenes thrown in.

And then there’s the simple fact that as working video game designer, I gotta write what I’m told to write. I was never filled with a burning desire to expand upon the adventures of He-Man, a footnote of 1980s Saturday morning cartoons notable for his blond pageboy haircut and musclebound physique, too gay to be gay, and his battles against Skeletor, but that’s where my paycheck was coming from, and that’s what I did. And a reviewer was kind enough to call my effort on that “competent,” which is as good as I could hope for.

Unless you’re Emily Dickinson, and probably even then, as a writer you write to be read. You want the characters to fascinate, the theme to enthrall, the pages to fly (except when the reader pauses to reread the part where you describe an asphalt road with such lyricism it brings tears to the eyes), and copies of the book to be in every man jack’s hands.

So can the story of an old woman in made-up town have that sort of effect?

I hope so, but it’s been a busy couple of days, and I’ve only put another 5,000 words into the novel, and I’ve taken about 2,000 words out. The slow slog towards first draft is slow and, needless to say, sloggy.

But I know this old biddy like she was me.