They say write what you know, which I used to consider rather flimsy advice. What’s the point of writing if you’re not making stuff up? And most people, all they know is the same boring stuff. Of course, some people like to read the same boring stuff. It has something to do with catharsis, and metaphor, and compare/contrast, and bunch of other stuff I allegedly learned in school.
As a result of write what you know, I think a lot of writers end up writing about writers. My latest is a case in point. Go ahead and take a gander at “Tooth and Nail.” The first sentence was my way of sort of invoking the muse: “An average, every-day sort of guy walks into a coffee shop with the intention of getting a cup of joe, opening his laptop, and writing a perfectly normal story.” I really was desperate to write a boring, simple story. The result, alas: magical realism.
Go over to Wikipedia to see if this is, actually, magical realism, or just a cheap facsimile thereof. Suffice it to say my goal, once I got into it, was to make it real. I didn’t want it to be just an extended metaphor– I wanted all of those fantasy elements to be part of the story, not just in the main character’s imagination. Not sure if I achieved that, although I think it’s more or less obvious by the time he talks to his mom on the phone. Of course, one could point out that any fantasy story is just an extended metaphor. Ah, shaddap.
Maybe “write what you know” is not advice, but sort of a description. You will end up writing what you know, regardless, so you’d better start knowing some pretty interesting stuff before you write. Thanks to the internet, though, we can all become instant experts, so we don’t have to guess our way through esoterica in order to achieve verisimilitude.
At any rate, in this story I think I accidentally ended up meeting my original goal, having tricked myself by the distractions in the main character’s world. So, if you want, you can read the story he wrote, as a stand alone document, by clicking on “An Average, Everyday Story.” Actually, that was the original title of “Tooth and Nail” before I decided that, ultimately, I didn’t want an “ironic” title afterall. And, while we’re on the subject, I have also posted a version of Tooth and Nail that sets the main character’s writing in italics, just in case you want to keep them separate. Personally, I wouldn’t want it that way, but that’s the opinion of a reader, not a writer, so consider it with a grain of salt.
Finally: no, I did not spell “know” wrong in the title of this post.
FAT PS! I popped “Tooth and Nail” into a silly little analyzer called “I Write Like” and this is what it told me:
So that’s one robot’s vote for the Magical Realism thing!
