Mark Twain
Mark Twain advised, "Write what you know." It's good advice. His most successful books were set in the Missouri where he grew up; they seem authentic because they are. Tom and Becky getting lost in a cave, or Huck going down the river with Jim, are the plots of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. The background of the stories, the ways the characters act, come from when and where Twain grew up, and the people around at that time. "Life on the Mississippi", likewise, draws on his experience as a steamboat pilot.
He didn’t always take his own advice. "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" fails miserably, mainly because he falls victim to the fallacy that historical people must be stupid, otherwise they’d have modern science, modern education, and a modern system of government. Twain seems to think that a modern American could walk in, act rudely, and not get chopped to mincemeat, just because. The phrase “ugly American” hadn’t been invented yet, but—!
By Twain's day (1835-1910), there was an actual publishing industry, that printed not only non-fiction, but romance novels, mysteries, westerns, fairy tales, children's books, even books and stories that would later be called science fiction. There were newspapers. There was a middle class that could afford to buy books and newspapers, book stores in which to buy them, even public libraries. There were even professional writers, such as Edgar Allen Poe (1809-1849) and Zane Gray (1872-1939). Most writers wrote what they knew, and their writing is as dated today as their lives. Others wrote so well, or had such interesting lives, or both, that their books transcend the limits of their time. Consider Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867-1957).
Genres
Genres came about because "Everyone wants what everyone wants", as a friend of mine wrote in a play. To put it another way, if you don’t want to write what you know, you can write what someone else knows. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery … as long as you stay outside the bounds of plagiarism.
Westerns
Western fiction is all but extinct today, but in Twain's time, the Wild West was in full effect: the shootout at the OK Corral didn't happen until 1881, after the Civil War! Westerns were a popular form of writing from before the founding of the United States. Many of the authors were writing what they knew. Other westerns, once the rules of the genre were established, were written by authors who'd never been west of the Mississippi, or in some cases west of the Atlantic Ocean!
Again, you don’t have to have been a cowpuncher or an Army scout to write a western, once the rules of the genre are established. Long after whites were fighting Native Americans, or outlaw bands roamed the western U.S., western pulp magazines flourished, and western comic books were printed into the 1960’s and 1970’s, until the publishers decided that “cowboys and Indians” couldn’t compete with super-heroes.
The last man standing in the western field was Louis L'Amour (1908-1988). L'Amour was born in North Dakota, then bummed around the country both with his family and by himself. He turned his hand to many jobs, including as a professional boxer and a merchant seaman. In 1930 he and his family settled in Oklahoma, and he began writing. By the time of his death in 1988, he'd written over 100 books and more than 200 short stories in a variety of genres, and was one of the world's best-known and most-translated authors.
L'Amour is a prime example of "Write what you know." Between his childhood, his careers, his service during World War II, he had a lot of experience, and he used it all in his writing. He also talked to a lot of old gunmen who survived into the 1920’s and 1930’s, and learned what the West was really like. It doesn't matter if every trail, every stream, every mesa is exactly as he described it in one of his books: trails fade, streams change their course, and everything erodes. He convinces his readers that the claim is true, and that's what makes his books compelling.
War Stories
There was a huge boom of Civil War stories, by survivors of the bloodiest war in American history—and by draft-dodgers who paid others to take their place. Obviously, the ones who actually fought were writing what they knew!
Likewise, there was a flood of war stories after World War I, another after World War II, and some after Korea and Vietnam. Each produced its share of men writing what they knew, for example Audie Murphy in “To Hell and Back”, and you can’t read “Starship Troopers” without realizing that Robert A. Heinlein was in the military. Each war produced its phonies, too, such as John Wayne, who didn’t fight in World War II, but stayed home making movies written for Jimmy Stewart and Henry Fonda, while they were fighting for their country.
Wars go stale as topics of fiction sooner than eras like “the settlement of the West”, but the publishing industry encourages the survivors to write their stories, and the stay-at-homes eat them up — for a while.
Sports Stories
It’s a shame that larger-than-life Western figures like Wyatt Earp or Bat Masterson didn’t write western stories, instead of being the inspiration for numerous other writers. But Bat, at least, moved east of the Mississippi and became a writer. He ended his days married to an Eastern gal, writing about sports and the sporting scene in New York City.
You can’t mention the genre of sports fiction without bringing up Dick Francis, a champion steeplechase jockey who retired and then produced over 40 crime novels, all involving horse racing. Obviously, he wrote what he knew — and he wrote it well.
Crime Fiction
I don’t know if you call truly call crime fiction a “genre”; it’s so broad, and covers so much. Is “The Count of Monte Cristo” part of the same “genre” as “The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes”, “Lady, Lady, I Did It!”, “Listening Woman”, and “Naked in Death”? I’m dubious.
You can say that Conan Doyle created the private detective when he invented Sherlock Holmes. The genius who solves crimes, his less-brilliant but useful assistant, the bumbling cop, and the arch-enemy and/or criminal mastermind have been widely copied, not least by the late, great Rex Stout with his Nero Wolfe/Archie Goodwin series. But do police procedurals like Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct series, or J. D. Robb’s “In Death” books, fit in the same genre or a related genre?
It’s definitely a genre, or set of genres, each with its own rules, because few of these writers were private detectives or former police officers. They aren’t writing what they know personally.
Science Fiction
Is science fiction (scientifiction, speculative fiction, scifi, “that Buck Rogers stuff”) a genre? Jules Verne (1828-1905), one of the fathers of science-fiction, wrote about submarine warfare in "20,000 Leagues under the Sea", air warfare in "Robur the Conqueror", space flight in "From the Earth to the Moon", and subterranean exploration in "Voyage to the Center of the Earth." But he vehemently denied that he wrote science fiction!
H. G. Wells (1866-1946), though forty years younger, was also a father of science-fiction, inventing time travel in "The Time Machine", alien invasions in "The War of the Worlds", and many other central ideas of science fiction. But his main theme was social progress, not science
Science fiction has never been convincingly defined. For me, the central element must be science, and science is as boundless as the universe itself. Leave out the science, and you can call anyone who writes about going to the Moon a "father of science fiction", even if they do it in a chariot drawn by swans, or by the evaporation of dew. You can even call Mary Shelley a mother of science fiction, because she wrote about using electricity to bring dead people back to life!
You certainly can’t “write what you know”, unless you believe, as H. Beam Piper did, that you’ve lived before, and write what you dream, as if the dream were literal experience. Not that you can’t, nonetheless, produce great fiction, I hasten to add! You can certainly incorporate real-world experience in science fiction, as David Drake did in using his Vietnam experience in his “Hammer’s Slammers” stories.
You can write fiction that uses science-fiction elements like space travel or time travel, take it for granted that such things are possible, and use “universal communicators” to talk to aliens, whose cultures are just like our own, or some culture very much like one out of our past. The term for that is “space opera”. In the pulp days, when an author couldn’t sells a western story to one magazine, he’d change the horses to rocket ships, the Indians to aliens, and the six-shooters to ray guns, and sell the story to a “science-fiction” magazine. I call that “scifi”.
Fantasy
When I was growing up, fantasy had degenerated to fairy tales sold as children's literature, and stories about ghosts, witches, devils, and monsters for older children. It was pretty pitiful stuff, found in horror comics and horror magazines.
But Robert A. Heinlein had written a story, "Magic, Inc.", about a world where magic worked, had laws, and was a central element of modern society. This wasn’t “write what you know”, but “what if?” Manly Wade Wellman wrote a series of stories about a balladeer with a silver-stringed guitar, named John, who wandered up and down Appalachia, facing evils. Poul Anderson wrote "The Broken Sword," a grim tale of Vikings and trolls and elves.
But fantasy didn't become respectable as adult reading until J.R.R. Tolkien's work caught on in the 60's and 70's. Since then we have a lot of fantasy writing, and a lot of older fantasy reprinted.
Tolkien is another example of "Write what you know." As a Professor of Anglo-Saxon and a Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford, he was deeply familiar with ancient folklore, giving him a solid foundation for "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings". Tolkien wrote what he knew, from the inside out, from his education and study — and brought a whole field of fiction roaring back to life!
SCA stories
I've probably written more on this site about the Society for Creative Anachronism than the subject deserves, so if you want, just skip down to the challenge. But it's relevant to this diary and its title, I promise.
One of the earliest issues of Tournaments Illuminated, the SCA's magazine, featured a fiction story about the organization. The heroine, the new bride of an SCA knight, goes to a tournament with him. He promptly leaves her to her own devices so he can go fight all day (the cad). She wanders around lost, talks to various tourney goers who aren't out on the field trying to bash each others' brains in, and learns some stuff about the SCA. When she discovers there's a cooking contest, she enters a jar of spider jelly, which she just happens to have with her, saying it's an old family recipe. (What was her family, a gang of ghouls?) At the end of the story, hubby's disappointed that he didn't win the tourney, but wifey is announced as the winner of the contest!
From February 1971 to December 1992, the SCA was my whole life except for whatever job I had at the time. I did the whole nine ells: I fought, I held every office except Arts, I made armor, I recruited new members, I learned heraldry, I taught people how to play medieval forms of chess, I learned to play recorder and played at events, published a magazine about the Middle Ages, and much more. For twenty-two years I was totally immersed in this stuff, from the local to the national level. I didn't do everything equally well, but I did do everything.
When I started my second novel, "The Last-Minute Queen", I held nothing back. Everything I could think of went into that book, which covers a whole tourney year from March Crown to Twelfth Night. People get divorced, people get married, people are made knights, and laurels, and pelicans. There are tournaments, a war with another kingdom, demonstration events, Comic-Con, and the annual Board meeting. People fight, dance, sing, write poetry, play games, play music, perform plays, practice archery, enter contests, and attend feasts -- and that's not even mentioning the dragon, the abduction, or the trial and execution!
"Write what you know?" I could write LMQ because I knew the SCA thoroughly. Some of the things in the story actually happened. Some didn't, but could have. Others did, but perhaps not exactly as I portrayed them. Some of the people in the story were real, I just changed their names a little. Others were single people split into many different characters, each one representing one facet of what she or he did. And a few, I actually made up from scratch!
The only other book I've ever read with an SCA setting is "Murder at the War", by Mary Monica Pulver. It's a murder mystery, which happens at the Pennsic War, an annual war between the Middle Kingdom and the East Kingdom every year. I presume that the author is, or was, a member of the SCA out east, and that her book is faithful to her own SCA experience. If so, the Middle and East, in her time, were vastly different from the west-coast kingdoms in mine!
The challenge for tonight (finally!)
You're probably already practicing "write what you know," each in your own way. Let's stretch you out of your comfort zone a little. Look over your work in progress. What's missing that your could add without distorting the story? Perhaps your characters get together to play cards once a month, and you've never bothered to mention it? Perhaps one of your characters was a track star in college, and still goes running in the mornings, and no one knew? Try to pick something that makes a character more rounded, or more interesting.
No limits on wordage, but keep it to a scene, not a whole new story. Let's see you tweak your stuff just a little. Maybe it’ll make your characters seem more real. Maybe it’ll make your story a little more interesting. Maybe it’ll give you an idea for another story. (Maybe the horse will learn to sing!)
If not, you can always go back to the version without the changes, right?
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