Lost in Thought
Let’s go back to the famous adage of writing about what
you know. Nearly everything we write is, in some way, autobiographical. That
is, we draw on our own life experiences and turn them into fact or fiction. Think
about it. Everyday we tell somebody a ‘story’ about something that has happened
to
ourselves, or a friend, the dog, or a member of the
family. We recreate the scene for dramatic effect, to make people laugh, gain sympathy,
etc., while minimising or maximising our own personal involvement in the story.
We do this for several reasons:
• we want to give a particular slant to the story
• the story needs livening up
• the story shows us in a favourable light
• the story doesn’t show us in a particularly
favourable light
• we need to abdicate any responsibility for what
happened
• we feel the need to appear more important
• we need to shift the blame
The older we are, the more experience and resources we
have to draw on for story-telling. Although the media makes a great fuss of any
bright, new talent that comes along, those who’ve passed the Big 4-0 have
written a larger number of first novels. Of course, it pays to follow the general
guideline of writing about what we know but the older we get the more
opportunities we have had for observing the behaviour and life-styles of those different
to ourselves over a wider passage of time. Even if we are only involved on the
periphery of another way of life, the viewpoint of the uninformed observer can
also be used to enhance a story-line.
Which, of course, brings us back to the subject of
writing about what we know. Here again, we must look at perspective and viewpoint
and, if we want to be pedantic, define the meaning of the word ‘know’ in
writer’s jargon. Most writing tutorials insist on us sticking to what we ‘know’
and yes, it does give an aura of credibility to the text, but does this mean we
can never step outside the world of which we have first-hand experience?
Let’s look at Janice … and Rosie
Janice has had over twenty year’s nursing experience,
specialising in midwifery, but she doesn’t want to restrict her writing to
hospital romances and articles for nursing journals – she wants to be a science
fiction writer. She’s lost count of the times she’s been told that she should
‘stick to what she knows’ and write about nursing, even though she’s fed up
with it. What does she do?
Firstly: Janice already has had a
couple of articles published in the professional journals and has now been
encouraged to try a slightly different angle with some of the weekly women’s magazines.
Even though she’s lost interest in nursing as a fulltime career, it can still
provide her with that necessary ‘shot in the arm’ that all writers get from
seeing their work in print while she works on her fiction. A modest portfolio
of non-fiction successes will support the proposal for her novel when she sends
it out, because she will be viewed in a more sympathetic light than an absolute
beginner. She wouldn’t be the first freelance writer to subsidise novel writing
from a successful career in non-fiction.
Secondly: After a rather intense
brain-storming session at her local writers’ group, she came up with the core
idea of a medical crew aboard a spaceship being sent to investigate why all the
new-born babies of the inter-galactic colonists were mysteriously dying. Since
human biology was unlikely to alter much in the sf-future, her personal
experience added weight to the reality of the explanations to non-medical characters
and the dialogue between the medical team. Once she had gotten over her
antipathy towards the inclusion of
medicine in the plot, she became really enthusiastic about the idea.
Science fiction writer Rose Oliver, however, highlights
the difficulties involved in writing about an unfamiliar world. “I think, for example, that
science fiction writing demands more creativity
than other genres because while other writers can draw on the past and present for
background, plots etc., sf writers have nothing like this to grab hold of
from the future. In my story, ‘Cold Pressure’, published in Jupiter magazine the underwater
scene was a humdinger to pull together. My protagonists were in a cave’s air
pocket. What
would they
see? Oops! No light. Enter stage right, phosphorescent plankton. The protagonists
needed oxygen. Now where would that come
from? Then I discovered some seaweed had oxygen-filled bladders. O.K. Let’s make
them bigger and popping. Even better, their popping
movement would make the plankton light up and grow. The seaweed would then feed
off the dead plankton. Yippee! Got a miniworld. Next came drinking water.
In a sea? Impossible. Give up on story.
A while later, husband mentioned fresh water could be pressed out of fish. Back to
story…”
Obviously Rosie Oliver isn’t writing about a world she knows,
and even her characters have to be moulded by the science and society of their
time. “In
the novel I am rewriting, the
heroine
has been born and brought up under a much higher gravity than those she lives and
works with. She has to be more careful not to break
things, forcing her to act in a more deliberate manner. It makes her more precise in both
thought and action. This, in turn, means she survives
dangerous situations with split second judgement when her colleagues cannot. When we
first meet her, she has already left a trail of
dead partners who did ‘not make the grade’. And as for the bedroom… She is
nicknamed ‘The Ice’ for very good reasons. Putting such an unusual rounded
character together from a background detail takes quite a bit of time and
brainwork!”
Imagine the extra work necessary to evolve a plot from
an innovative premise; build the background world from scratch; and align
characters with their unusual world. But as we can see, writing about what we
know doesn’t necessarily mean placing restrictions on what we can write about.
It means utilising personal knowledge, background, interests and experience and
moving it into another dimension, if necessary. As with life in general, we
have to understand why the rules are there and what purpose they serve before
we set our story in ancient Egypt, feudal Japan or the distant future.
Creative energy fuels creativity, so immerse yourself
with creative images and stimulating art forms to give fresh ideas and ignite
the creative flame.
Secret Step Five is tapping into whatever
can unleash creative energy.
But where do those ideas
come from?
Roots & Memories
Most of us would say that we come from very ordinary backgrounds.
That is, before we start reminiscing and going over the family history and
realise that there’s an awful lot of material there from which to draw. This
doesn’t mean sitting down and writing a family saga, but it does offer the
opportunity to scatter little cameos throughout our writing based on factual or
anecdotal family stories. It also encourages us to follow the tangled skeins
and discover new information about our own heritage. Look how popular the
television series, Who
Do You Think You Are? has become – and what
remarkable stories have been revealed about very ordinary people.
For example: when leafing through A Dictionary of English Surnames, I came across the entry for
‘Slaymaker
div. A weaver’s reed or shuttle. Always a rare name. Formerly more common but
now apparently extinct’.
Now Slaymaker was my maternal great-grandmother’s maiden name and our
relations still lived on the family farm
in the village until the late 1970s when the elder son died in a farming accident and the
younger son moved away after the father
hung himself in the barn. There’s got to be a ‘cameo’ in there somewhere … along
with the grandfather who was
awarded
the Scouting’s Medal of Merit by Lord Baden Powell … a great aunt who claimed to
have been a music-hall entertainer although
we all suspected her occupation was something far less respectable! … another
great aunt who served as a nurse with Edith
Cavell. My maternal grandmother was head cook at a Derbyshire country estate
that played host to the then Prince of Wales
for a shooting party; she could remember talk about the sinking of the Titanic, and
below-stairs gossip of the time that linked
the Duke of Clarence with Jack the Ripper long before popular television raised
the question.
Most families have a ‘sheep fold’ where all the black
sheep have been consigned over the years – and very few of us come from pure
Celtic or Anglo-Saxon stock. There’s all sorts of mixes in our blood-lines that
account for family feuds that go on for generations. Even if we are an ‘only
child’, in our immediate family we have four different strains from each of our
grandparents. And what about all those ‘uncles and aunts’ that hover about on
the periphery, who are no relation at all and yet have always been considered
part of the extended family. My father had one such ‘Uncle Jack’ who’d been a
military doctor during the Zulu wars and who had brought home a shield and
assegai from Rourke’s Drift, having arrived at the site after the battle to
treat the wounded. Then there are the internecine squabbles that drive families
apart through lies and deceit – not to mention the tales of missing jewellery
after the funeral, and the Birthday Book!
Never under estimate your family connections, dead or alive
they can provide rich pickings for many years to come, so long as you treat
each one like a little gem and not squander them wantonly. As Jeff Heffron
writes in The
Writer’s Idea Book: “Use
heritage –
ethnic and familial – as material for your writing. It’s probably the richest
source you possess.” And
remember, you don’t have to cast them in their own period; you can move them around
in time and space, wherever you choose.
Our roots, or family background, often give a personal
insight into why we behave towards certain people in a particular manner. Did
someone, or something, have a control or influence over us that was either
rewarding, or detrimental to our development? My mother could remember living
in fear of getting a clout across the back of the legs from her grandmother’s
walking stick, which the old girl used to administer when neither of her parents
were looking. She never dared tell them because it wasn’t the done thing to
report such matters.
It’s not just family who can provide us with background
information and character-cameos for our writing. Every place we visit, every
passing stranger is grist for our respective writing mill as we observe,
catalogue and file away snippets of ‘life’ to be recycled and examined as and when
the need arises. What about the old chap whom you wave to every morning as he
sits by his window day after day? You haven’t a clue who he is, or why he sits
there, but there’s a short story, article and poem in there if you think about
it hard enough.
