WRITE WHAT YOU HAVE TO KNOW
Every writing teacher says: write what you know. Lee Smith says we have to write about what we need to know. To make that leap from “write what you know” to write what you do not know but can only imagine. Can’t not imagine.
This is the best advice for getting into what Robert Olen Butler calls “yearning,” what Janet Burroway calls “the drama of desire.” That deep thrummy thing that must be engaged with if your work is to have its grip on us.
Alice Munro says write what you do not know so you can live twice.
When Lee Smith lost her son and couldn’t write and couldn’t get over her grief she saw a psychiatrist who wrote on his tiny prescription pad: “write every day.” It took four days.
Living in another narrative for two hours a day is good, good, good.
I’m getting my spring classes together, ordering books. Writing my former students to get ideas. Planning a class is exactly like drafting a short story. A pile of pages on my desk. A list of possible “scenes” aka concepts. What I want to show. A stack of books.
As I plan my classes, I’m thinking, too, a lot about the essay in The American Scholar, about the death of the study of English. And how in our creative writing classes, we’ve been teaching the straight up pure love of books and authors and appreciating deeply the historical order, and reading widely, without borders, without weird theories—reading and loving books and needing them. Yearning for what they have to teach us. All along! That’s what we’ve always done in creative writing. No wonder creative writing programs have proliferated! We embody the traditional study of English: read books, talk about them, and try to notice and name the small essential sacred aspects of human experience. Who are we? What is the shape of our experience and what might it mean?
What we have to know.
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This is so wonderful! Thank you. I love this:”Lee Smith says we have to write about what we need to know.” And the leap you make to creative writing study.
Heather, thank you for the great insights. I love that quote from Alice Munro. I think it says everything about why someone chooses to write fiction.
I keep coming back to this post, rereading it. This is the fourth or fifth time I’ve looked for it in your blog, like a touchstone I return to, use to realign my compass as I write forward.