Broken Frontier

Author's Note: First of all, let me apologize for not posting a new column last week. You'll soon find out why. Meanwhile, I was hoping more people would take up the challenge and write a page about a barn. To date, I have only received one entry. If I don't get any others, the one writer among you will be the winner by default. Any takers?

"Write what you know."

I have rather mixed feelings about this statement. On the one hand, I recognize that it contains a great deal of truth. On the other hand, however, I wonder how much of this truth has – like other oft-repeated aphorisms such as "a picture is worth a thousand words" – been acquired simply through repetition.

There is no doubt that when a writer has unique first-hand experience, the results can be stunning. The war films of writer-director Samuel Fuller (The Big Red One and Steel Helmet, to name just two) are recognized as outstanding classics of the genre, largely due, I suspect, to the fact that Fuller actually fought the battles he later wrote about. Jim Thompson, the pulp fiction author whose books have provided the source for such films as The Killer Inside Me, The Grifters and After Dark, My Sweet, grew up under conditions similar to many of his characters. His father was a small-town sheriff, and Thompson himself worked as a hotel clerk running drugs and booze for customers.

Many writers, however, recognize the difficulty with writing what they know when it comes to things they don't know. I've never been to war, but I don't honestly believe that I shouldn't write about it. The most obvious solution to this kind of problem is to perform research. To talk to people who have done the things you want to write about. I have done tons of research for various writing projects over the years. I once went on what is called a "ride-along" with a police officer on Friday night during swing shift. If you've ever seen "Cops," you have an idea of the kind of stuff I got to see first-hand. Years before 9-11, I was allowed into the air-traffic control tower at a major metropolitan airport. I'm quite positive I would be under FBI investigation if I even tried to secure the same kind of research opportunity these days.

I had a great deal of fun during those research experiences and I was able to write much more effectively about the scenes and characters they involved. The downside is that you can perform too much. You can find out so many neat facts that you feel compelled to work them into the writing. This can make the piece read more like an encyclopedia article than a good story. I hope that the problems with that are obvious.

But even research can't solve the problem when writing about such things as leaping tall buildings in a single bound or traveling through time. In other words, how can you write what you know when no one really knows what you're writing about? You can't, of course. So what are we to do about this rule? One solution I have seen is to simply change the phrase. Usually into something like this:

"Write what you don't know."

I am a writer, after all. My job is to tell stories. To make stuff up. Easy enough. As we've said already, just because I've never killed anyone doesn't mean I can't write a story about someone who does just that. So why has this "Write what you know" phrase acquired such a heavy reputation?

I think the problem here is that we're missing the point of these ideas. At one level, you will always be writing about things you don't know. Yet at the same time, the best writers will still hold true to the first rule. That's because they understand that writing what you know has more to do not with the parts we make up, but with the parts that can't – and shouldn't – ever be made up: what it means to be human; what it means to love, or to hate, or to forgive, or to forget. These are the truths we should never avoid.

What this means is that I must have experience with being a human being in order to write about these things. You may laugh and say, "Of course you have experience being a human being – you are one!" But I'm talking about real experience with real people. I'm talking about having actual relationships, not virtual ones. I'm talking about knowing what it means to love someone and have them hate you, instead of reading about someone else's account in a book somewhere.

As some of you may know, I have just moved from Orange County, California, to Erie, Pennsylvania. In the eight days it took my wife and family to drive those 3,275 miles, we met and saw people that I never would have met or seen if we had stayed in California. Every turn along the way reminded me of just how little I actually know. From the flat baking plains of Arizona and New Mexico, to the lush woods of Arkansas and Tennessee, to our new home on a lake so large it looks like the ocean, I encountered one new experience after another. What do you think I did with them? I wrote them down in the notebooks I kept handy all along the way. Writers need wells from which to draw characters and experiences. Getting out into the real world is quite simply the best way to research so that you can, ultimately, write what you know.