Writing what you know
I come from a very close-knit family, and when I left Maine and moved to New York, it was a big deal. Pestering me about coming home became part of the routine on holidays, a campaign headed up by my grandmother. “Why do you want to be down there, so far from everything?” she would ask. Apparently, those who think New York is the capital of the world have another thing coming––the epicenter of the universe is, in fact, Portland, Maine.
I stayed in New York for five years, a long time to stay somewhere where I never intended to live permanently. There is certainly more than one truth about why this was so, but one controlling reason was that I wanted to be able to set stories there. A place so soaked in art, so packed with people from everywhere doing everything imaginable, and so rife with the issues, and the possibilities, of urbanization seems ideal for a writer. Something about a big city, with all its grit and glamour, is just more exciting and more worthy.
Two years ago, my school participated in a program called “Writing the City,” which was a partnership between the NYC Department of Education and New York University. Writers from the university came into our classrooms to do activities with students to get them to use the city they know–their city–to generate original, authentic writing. One thing students did was draw a map of a part of the city they thought was important as a pre-writing exercise to getting them thinking about community as a physical place. At first, several students wanted to map places like Times Sq, Central Park, and the financial district around Wall St. When I saw that they were having a hard time getting started, I intervened.
Quickly, the source of the trouble became clear. They couldn’t draw a map of a Manhattan neighborhood from memory because they had no memories. By subway, you can get from Bushwick to Manhattan in under fifteen minutes, but your life has to take you there. Once they started mapping places they knew, labeling favorite hangouts, restaurants, friends’ houses, churches–personal landmarks that were directly connected to their lives–they became engaged and finished the assignment easily, full of things to write about.
I wasn’t asked to create a map myself, but I thought about how I would and realized that it wouldn’t be easy. I could certainly have recreated the streets around my apartment with accuracy––the grocery store, the subway station, the pizzeria––but it wouldn’t have meant what my students’ maps did at all. I cared about my neighborhood, and had many fond memories of people and places, but it was still a far cry from being home, literally or spiritually.
That lack of home showed in my writing, too. Amid many points that could stand improvement, one aspect of my fiction writing that I think is consistently good is that it reads easily and doesn’t feel contrived. When I tried to set stories in New York, I struggled to find that ease, and never really did. I was too focused on the geography, exactly where characters were going and how they were going to get there, and logistical issues, like (I wish I were making this up) recycling rules and how to avoid parking tickets. I could write dialogue that sounded like the people around me, but it didn’t feel genuine. I had looked at and listened to New York as a writer, but I could only write about my New York experience as “I,” I couldn’t generalize, couldn’t become someone else and see life in New York from a different perspective. I couldn’t make it literature.
“Write what you know” is a truism every writer has heard, and it is true as far as it goes. I thought I could know New York just by knowing a lot about it, that there was some point at which the things I knew about it would reach critical mass. It doesn’t work that way though, any more than knowing biographical facts about someone means you understand him as a friend does.
My writing mentor from college, by way of encouragement, suggested that maybe just living in a place like New York is so much work that you can’t pull back enough to write it while it’s happening around you. Over time, he said, those details of survival will be cast into softer focus, and what is literary and universal about the place will emerge. Maybe, but this wisdom is coming from an author who only sets his novels in Worcester, his hometown, so this theory hasn’t been tested.
My memories of New York are still sharp, and if they become fiction at some point, it will be gratifying. If they don’t, well, that’s okay, too. I know what place my map shows. And it just so happens that it’s the epicenter of the universe.
Nice. I’ve had time this morning to read this slowly and thoughtfully. I gave Mom her 5:30 am pills, then didn’t go back to sleep myself.
As I think of it now, writing fiction seems a matter of somehow managing to jump onto an already spinning merry-go-round. Character is action, we are told. Spin. But any reader also knows instinctively that place is character, and action is place. Spin.
My Texan friend Clay began writing one of his novels with nothing but the single word “scooched” in mind. It appears in the first sentence of the book and isn’t even used with a meaning I had known before. Clay and I grew up in small towns in different corners of the world. A lot of miles separate Westbrook, Maine and Quanah, Texas.
You may well find that no matter how much you travel or where you live your stories are mostly set in small east coast cities, more or less at latitude 43°39′N.