writing and experience

[truepenny]

I've been thinking about this issue, about the intersection between a writer's life and a writer's work, and it seems to me that there are two types, neither arche- nor stereo-, floating around. One is summed up in the maxim write what you know (which, like most writing advice, works better as a koan than as a command), the other in the idea of the writer as a vampire, as someone who can't do anything or see anything or hear anything without thinking I can use that, who preys on his or her relatives and friends and acquaintances for "material."

I don't think any writer will deny that experience informs writing. I tried to deny it when I was in my teens and twenties, but that was because I had been assailed unmercifully by the "write what you know" camp . As valuable as I have found Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird to be, one of her weaknesses is that she assumes all writing is therapy, that everyone inevitably and transparently writes about their childhood and that everyone's childhood was traumatic. And, you know, there's a way in which that's true; many sf writers have protagonists who are outsiders, people who don't fit, and it's not unreasonable to see a correlation between that and the likelihood that any given sf writer grew up as a misfit. (Likelihood, I said. Not certainty. I'm generalizing, but I'm not claiming a universal truth.) But--and here's the part where we start treating write what you know as a koan--it does not have to be literal truth. Not everything we write has to be autobiography, thinly disguised or not disguised at all. Our childhood experience informs what we write. It does not have to be our subject matter.

And we can choose to write something else. We can choose to try to look beyond our own narcissistic reflection and try to write something not informed by our experience. This, of course, is where the writer-as-vampire trope kicks in: experience we don't have, we leech from other people.

Some writers may be perfectly happy with write what you know on its most literal level; there are plenty of memoirists out there, and I suspect the percentages of good writing, bad writing, and successful writing (notice that none of the three categories is synonymous with either of the other two) are about the same as they are in any other genre. Ninety percent of everything is crap. Personally and as a writer, I don't find that satisfying; I'd rather define "what you know" as anything I'm capable of imagining. This works particularly well in secondary world fantasy, of course, where a person can, in fact, MAKE THE WHOLE THING UP. Other genres may require research . . . and we're back to the Vampire Artiste again, stealing truth and reality from other people. (And there are real examples of this happening: the one that springs to mind for me is the one I've read about most recently: Binjamin Wilkomirski, who did blatantly steal and pass off as his own the experiences of another person.)

Now, nobody wants to be That Guy, and this is the thing I've been thinking about: how does a writer use experience responsibly? And I include in that a writer's own experience: do you use things that happen to you? (Which, of course you do. You can't help it. It's the same brain. You can't make yourself a tabula rasa, and if you could, I don't think it would work out well.) And I think the answer is in intent.

Notice, please, that I'm talking about this here as a person who writes, and yes, thank you, I do have authorial intent. Now, this is a different kind of authorial intent than the kind that critics talk about, or belabor other critics for talking about--as I've said on more than one occasion, I loathe biographical criticism, and it's frequently for that reason. When critics talk about "authorial intent," they're talking about an authorial intent that is (re)constructed out of the text (and possibly, if the critic is lucky, an interview or some letters or some other independent verification that, yes, that is what the author had in mind). They're not talking about it as writers. This is the key thing, and I'm going to get abstract and theoretical for a second.

There are two completely different levels of conceptualization here. On one level, the writer's level, writing is an activity like skating or gardening or playing the kazoo. It's a thing that you do, and like all things that you do, you do it for reasons and with goals in mind. These goals may be very vague ("Have fun!") or very specific ("Grow enough vegetables in the backyard to feed a family of four, with enough variety that we will not be beating each other to death with the zucchini come September.") or deeply contingent on environmental response ("Bug my sister until she lets me have the Nintendo.") And the same thing with writing stories. You do it because you want to have fun, because you have an idea you want to articulate, because you have a response you want to get from your audience. On this level, you, the writer, are an anthropological subject just as much as any other human being, and your writing is just as suitable for anthropological investigation as rites of passage (getting one's driver's license) or fertility rituals (Senior Prom) or the customs surrounding cultural taboos ("feminine hygiene" commercials).

But there's another level, and that's the level that comes into play when the story leaves the author's control. (I'm not saying, mind you, that this process is not also fraught with anthropological interest, but the anthropological subject in no longer the writer, but the reader.) For the sake of brevity, let's call this "being published," although there are certainly other models available. A published story will be read by people the author does not know. It will be read by those people when the author is not present. Readers have no access to the author as an anthropological subject; they have no access to the anthropological intent ("Have fun!" or "Grow vegetables!" or "Bug my sister!"), and so, for them, the author becomes a function of the story.

This is what Foucault meant when he said the author was dead. (It's been a while since I read that one--does Foucault remember to include himself, as the author of the essay?) The author as anthropological subject has no existence in the text. So "authorial intent" isn't an anthropological concept; it's a literary construct generated by a text. As such, I think it's much more useful to talk about what the text does, rather than waffling about with what the author as constructed by the text meant to do. Texts have goals. They have agendas. They have mechanisms and fault-lines and absent centers. And they have them whether the author as an anthropological subject meant to put them there or not. The whole is always greater than the sum of its parts, and in the case of stories, the author, as an anthropological subject, is only one of the parts. By the time someone is reading a published story, the author has arguably ceased even to be the most important part, although s/he was, up until the point the story left his or her control. (And, no, I don't think the author ever stops being part of the story, either.)

Which is all a very roundabout way of saying writers, as anthropological subjects, go about the writing of stories with intent. That intent does not matter to the published story (which, remember, generates its own version of intent) but it matters to the anthropological subject who is a writer, because that anthropological subject is the one who has to go about the daily business of being a human being as best he or she can.

And so on this level, on the anthropological level, on the level of the writer, intent is important. It matters whether you use your research and your experience mindfully and ethically or whether you approach it with an eye to profit. (As a famous fantasy writer is said to have remarked on reading Tolkien, "I can use this.") Are you thinking like a vampire? Are you using other people's experiences like pints of whole blood to infuse life into your story?

Or are you making the empathic and imaginative jump, using experience, your own and others', as the jumping off point to something larger and deeper? Are you transforming what you read and hear and see, forcing it through the meshes and distilleries of your own psyche? Are you using your experience in your writing because doing so forces you to think more carefully and truthfully about the experience itself? Because at that point, I think we go from using experience in writing to using writing as a part of experience, as a part of living mindfully in the world

The work and the life should feed each other.

Comments

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

I think "Write what you know" needs to be combined with "Know what you know."

I grew up in a rural area of New York State as part of a large Jewish minority. This experience is apparently much like growing up Catholic in a Protestant area of rural Minnesota, or Protestant in a Catholic one. But it doesn't match growing up as a member of the only Jewish family in a small town.

On the other hand, I've read stories whose authors were heavily involved in the politics of, say, Philadelphia; and took it for granted that Los Angeles politics (for example) worked the same way. And in the real world, political candidates sometimes hire successful campaign operatives from other states -- not with good results.

And, of course, knowing what you know is probably part of being mindful.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Yes. Good point.

[spartezda.livejournal.com]

Fascinating and thought-provoking. Thank you.

[lurker-lost.livejournal.com]

I'm going to switch the phrase around and go with "know what you write". XDDDD

And yes, very informative post. (I totally do the vampire-writer thing. But none of my stuff is fit for showing to others, so, IT'S FINE AT THE MOMENT. I'M ALLOWED TO WRITE CRAPLY!! >OO )

[lenora-rose.livejournal.com]

There are, as it happens, a ton of minor or major anecdotes or incidents from my life that have made it into early drafts of stories to give the protagonists something to do while having that conversation about Plot Point A or to demonstrate a character trait not easily demonstrated in the Big Plot Events. These seem, quite often, to have vanished from the later drafts or been transmuted beyond recognition; I figured out what it was about the real event that I needed, that I KNEW and which fit here, and extracted it harmlessly, and leaving the more vampiric elements to be touched by sunlight and turned to ash.

But it has occasionally felt as if I couldn't get from story idea to Story sometimes without that minor vampirism on the way as an extra boost.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Yes. A person has to start somewhere, or she'd never start at all.

[edited so the grammar does not suck]

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

I write what obsesses and possesses and fill me -- which right now means water clocks and ferret women and hell and revolutions, and when I was writing Living With Ghosts was musketeers and secrets and ghosts and mist and water and sharks and duels. It is inevitable that parts of me will show, but I do not do that deliberately and often recoil if I see it.
And I would rather die than write out of my childhood.
Kari

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Dude. This is me not writing about my childhood. And will continue to be for the foreseeable future.

What I meant was, our childhood shapes us, whether we want it to or not, and thus shapes our writing. There's another part of the discussion about the tension/disjunction/distance-or-lack-thereof between the writer as anthropological subject and the writer as storyteller--writing as action vs. writing as performance--which I completely did not get into. I, as an anthropological subject, prefer to be completely undetectable in my published stories, but I'm becoming aware of the ways in which that is not possible--at least, I can see me, whether anyone else can or not. And it's not on the literal autobiographical level; it's precisely on the level of continuing obsessions: ghosts and history and books.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

I didn't mean to imply you were writing about your childhood: apologies. It's more that I consciously avoid getting anyway near my own -- when asked in class to do life-writing, I was very underwhelmed and ended up writing about places rather than people. Certainly we are shaped by our past experiences and I can see many layers of myself in my books, too, but there are also lacunae, places I did not go which I notice when I reread (which I avoid!).

[lexiphanic.livejournal.com]

A published story will be read by people the author does not know. It will be read by those people when the author is not present. Readers have no access to the author as an anthropological subject; they have no access to the anthropological intent ("Have fun!" or "Grow vegetables!" or "Bug my sister!"), and so, for them, the author becomes a function of the story.

This right here is why WisCon creates trouble for me. Once I actually have access to an author--his/her physical appearance, personality, life experiences, creative inspirations--something changes in my reactions to the text, and it's no longer about my interaction with the text but rather about the author's own "intent." I've always thought the richness of literature (a term I apply very broadly) comes from the variety of interpretation brought by the audience; it's ability to illustrate the differences between the people who read it. Writings then often (for me, I emphasize) become simply sculpture--still beautiful and artistic, but something to be looked at and admired as my friend's creation, rather than experienced. I have this problem with actors as well, though it is less troublesome with visual artists and singers. Perhaps because of the more "obviously present" nature of the artists in those cases.

For the record, I agree with you on everything in this post, this is just the tangential stuff that it made me think of. A reader's perspective on a discussion of authors.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

No, I think that's a useful sidebar.

Something similar to that is one of the reasons (I have long suspected) that academic literary critics greatly prefer to study the works of people who are dead. No inconvenient anthropological subjects to get in the way of the text, to say, as Ursula K. Le Guin once said from the audience at the end of an academic panel on her work, "No, I didn't. And, of course, everyone's had the experience of meeting the brilliant writer who turns out to be an asshole or, conversely, reading a book by someone you've met and liked and it turns out to be terrible. The gap between the anthropological subject and the artist is problematic. And it's weird.

I have to say, though, I'm a little puzzled that you distinguish sculpture as something that can be admired but not experienced. Why sculpture?

[lexiphanic.livejournal.com]

I think it's the idea of static nature that made use that as an analogy. Of course sculpture can be very thought-provoking and experiential, but I couldn't think of another form quickly that expressed what I meant. Sculpture is also often not static at all, which further undermines my earlier statement, but perhaps that's why I'm not a writer! My intention (ha!) was to reference something that didn't resonate on a personal level anymore.

[girlpunksamurai.livejournal.com]

I think I'm sort of a mix on labels

I take part of the knowledge I gained form what happened to me and then the knowledge that `i sought out~ after certain things happened to me in regard to those things; this gives my fantasy work a ~very~ specific intention

[lenora-rose.livejournal.com]

Well, the nature of the work as compared to my life usually means those bits I borrow from real life are, inevitably, the small events; the story about the ice cream sandwich, or that incident from the Fringe Festival. In theory, I could merely note - put character detail here - and continue and have a coherent draft of the main events. But my brain prefers the subtractive edit to the additive, so I'd rather write in an incident, however vampiric.

But writing about my childhood? Not enough narrative, or trauma, for that.

me blathering

[mevincula.livejournal.com]

Foucault notwithstanding, the author is not dead when you read a text. This is a dragon I’ve been wrestling lately. There is no doubt that a text exists as a text. You read what is in front of you and you interpret the words based on your life, your prior reading, your mood, if it’s raining, etc. But the concept of the author, rightly or wrongly, will also inform a reader and the biography of the author will color and create meaning in what is read as well. There are obvious examples; the reaction of a reader to a black author using the N word, or a white author using the same word and so on. But the very concept of the sentence can change depending on the author’s biography. “A wide chasm separates the declaration of freedom from the realization of freedom, and there can be no greater folly than in believing that we have attained the latter when, in reality, we have accomplished only the former“ means one thing if you think Thomas Jefferson wrote it. But it may mean something completely different to you when you find out that the Marquis de Sade wrote it. Or, if Thomas Malory was a rapist and a thief of church goods, how then does one interpret Lancelot and Guinevere’s relationship? Is Lancelot still a hero? Or a rapist? How about the grail quest? I’ve spent years on that one.

But again, I say that I struggle with this because the text exists OUTSIDE of the author as well. the Marquis de Sade was a reprehensible human being and probable murderer, yet he wrote some of the most moving and real treatises on freedom (he was also rather funny). Lately, I’ve tried to separate myself from modern authors as well. At first the internet, chat boards, etc. seemed a boon - a real treat for getting a deeper understanding of the things I enjoyed. (and, Dude, I don’t mean by finding out all about your childhood, I mean by understanding a worldview). But I’m not so sure of that anymore. Perhaps it’s the uncertainty and distance of history that I need. Because now when an author pops on a message board and blathers on about history in a way that shows their utter ignorance, it colors my interpretation of every sentence I read. Whereas I may have previously thought they were cleverly rewriting history, or were positing a new paradigm, I’m now left wondering if they really are just that ignorant. And honestly, I’d rather not know.
on your larger point, I am a reader, not a writer, but the very concept of fiction insists that writing is informed by what you know, not copied.

[grass-angel.livejournal.com]

Authorial intent should be renamed to: What the reader thinks the author meant to say based on the text and their own opinions, with little to no knowledge of the author or their opinions/worldview.
I absolutely loathe authorial intent dicussions, especially because most people seem to interpet it in the first sense you give here. The author didn't put those exact ideas into the text, you got them from the text!


That being said, I like the idea of a 'What if?' type of writing.