Susie Helme
Mark Twain’s advice to writers was to ‘write what you know’, but I’m terrible at taking advice. I’ve written about first century Jews, and I am not a Jew, and 14th century Muslim lesbians, and I am neither a Muslim nor a lesbian. I’ve always been driven by the desire to learn about new things. I want to find out absolutely everything about what I don’t know, and once I do, I want to impart that experience to others.
When I was a (mobile telecoms) journalist, I chose to cover the issues that were the hardest for me—satcomms, mobile data. I’ve always thought that if I work hard enough, eventually I’ll get there. (Trouble is, how do you know when you’ve arrived and you can finally relax?)
Perhaps I’m just disobedient, but I’ve pushed the boat out pretty far in trying to ‘write what I don’t know’. My first two books The Lost Wisdom of the Magi and The Genizah Codex featured protagonists who were, basically, me, personality and emotion-wise, if not in life particulars. So, when I set out to write Dreaming of Jerusalem, I decided to create a protagonist who was just the opposite of me. Like me, she is passionate about changing the world and, at least in her teenage years, sees religion as the way to do that. But I’m an empath; she’s a sociopath. I’m a weakling; she’s a warrior. (BTW, critics have said that this is what’s wrong with Dreaming, so I’m still working on it.)
Author Lee Child turns Twain’s words around by suggesting, ‘Don’t write what you know; write what you feel’. That’s the ticket. That is what motivates us to write fiction—we want to make the reader feel what our protagonist feels. I write historical fiction, and I want to make the reader see the ancient world through the eyes of my protagonist, to feel the way she would have felt about things. I’m interested in what I call ‘paradigms’—how things can look to ancient people so different from how they look to us, why people believe what they believe and feel what they feel.
This is all a part of ‘Show don’t Tell’, isn’t it? We don’t want to Tell readers every juicy bit of information we’ve learned about the lumber business after sticking our head into dusty libraries or perusing the Internet for days on end. We want them to experience what’s it’s like to be a lumberjack, to feel the wind on their face.
I think at the core of the ‘write what you know’ is the injunction to glean some emotive essence from your own world, some treasure outsiders have yet to discover, some unique and thrilling secret which you can open up your heart to share. But who’s to say you can’t find that treasure by coming from the outside as well as from the inside? Often foreigners can pinpoint things that natives don’t notice, because they’re too familiar; we’re too used to them. Look at Bill Bryson, he’s made jokes about Americans that never occurred to me to notice, but once he wrote them down, I thought, ‘yeah, he’s right’.
OK, if you really know the lumber business, feel free to tell us all about it. But the best way to ‘write what you know’ is to write from the heart.
Coaching company Masterclass suggests 4 ways to do it:[1]
- Follow emotional truths
Stephenie Meyer, creator of the Twilight world, didn’t know everything about vampires and werewolves. What she knew about was what it feels like to be a teenager. The fact that the issues these teens were dealing with were unfamiliar (‘shall I tell my dad I’m dating a vampire?’) was a mere detail. She got to the heart of it.
- Reflect on a period of time in your life
What did you learn? What did you have to leave behind? How did you feel back then and how do you feel now? What was it that made you change?
- Freewrite
Keep a journal. Whenever you notice something that you find unusual, that makes you feel something, that speaks to your heart, that teaches you something new and exciting, write it down. You never know when you might find somewhere to work it into some scene in your novel.
Last but certainly not least,
- Put yourself in your character’s shoes
Bring the camera angle right up close, let the reader feel exactly what your protagonist is feeling. Use internal monologue, sensory clues, use props, Show don’t Tell.
As one of my mentors Dr Phil always says, there’s a difference between topics and issues. People may think they’re interested in topics, but what really turns them on are issues. Write everything you want about the lumber business, but don’t forget that the point is the feel of wind on your face, the thrill of wondering which way the trunk is going to fall, the excitement of hearing someone call, ‘Timber!’
[1] https://www.masterclass.com/articles/how-to-write-what-you-know
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