The good folks at Raindance sent me their newsletter this morning containing this How To Write What You Know article. Happily, it seems we agree that the mantra drummed into new writers to "Write what you know" is at best confusing and at worst profoundly limiting.
I have never been one to "write what I know". Recent completed scripts or movies include a short about a man who has just died and is about to be sent to hell, a Soho theatre in the London Blitz, Earth's first interstellar colony, and so on...
Varied for sure. All interesting (hopefully). But I have never experienced any of those things.
Needless to say, I subscribe to a lot of newsletters, blogs, etc. on writing and many of them have a script pitch section. I would say at least one in ten of these starts "A brilliant young writer struggles to be recognised, blah, blah, blah..." Occasionally I hope the premise is going to be subverted, but it rarely is.
I'm not saying never. It threw out interesting results in Adaptation (though I have yet to work out if I "liked" the film), but all too often it seems to result in wangsty navel-gazing and moaning about being under-appreciated.
I don't want to come off as too much of a bastard, though. I have written or outlined more than one project about a writer - one was about a formerly well-regarded playwrite now in his late 60s forced to do community service for assaulting a critic, the other about a writer who goes to a quite coffee shop to work on a manuscript and cure his writer's block where he meets an avid reader who helps him.
The first idea is, I think (admittedly I'm biased), a good idea. The second one is not. The difference?
The first idea (provisionally titled The Reprieve) may be about a writer, but it is not about writing. It is about a grieving man with a high opinion of himself who is thrust into a world of people who don't know him from Adam and see him as a self-important pensioner. Stripped of his adoring Yes-Men, who is he?
Of course, I know what the "Write what you know" mantra refers to. I am a middle-class white man from a comfortable family with the profound fortune of living in a leafy spa town. I would struggle to write a realistic story about crippling poverty in a South African slum - it's just not my world. Nor is 1940s London, nor Jupiter's moon Callisto, nor purgatory (though it sometimes feels like it!). But I am comfortable enough with the characters that I can write about them, even if I have to fudge detail on the worlds.
I know, have met, or can imagine the characters' internal worlds with enough clarity make them, if not realistic, believable. The sparks of inspiration that ignite the stories I develop come from striking together the rocks around me. If I were to travel to a South African slum, or knew someone who had lived, worked or grown up there, I could strike those rocks together and get a spark from that.
But that spark may produce a story about a group of aliens who are stranded on Earth and are a confined to filthy ghettos...
It is in filling these gaps in that I think the archetypes really come to the fore, though. In his book The Hero of a Thousand Faces Joseph Campbell identifies the archetypal mythic structure of a young hero who leaves home, has a series of adventures and returns a man. Now, I have never fought in a war, nor had my ship blown off course by an angry god, but I don't think I would struggle to write an adaptation of The Odyssey. That is because the archetypes and archetypal stories deal with hard-wired experiences and relationships.
While writing what you know can sometimes lead to work feeling overly specific and being of little interest to anyone other than the author or people in the same situation, writing too outside one's realm of understanding can make characters feel false.
If it isn't too broad a stroke, maybe the mantra should be reworked to "Write what you can imagine".
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