Write what you should know

But writers don’t always write about what we know, contrary to literary rumors. Sometimes, we write about what we should know.

Cathie Pelletier, Author’s Note, The One-Way Bridge

Cathie Pelletier

Aspiring writers are often advised to write what they know. It’s good advice, up to a point. Each of us is more competent writing about our own feelings, our own opinions or our own experiences than somebody else’s. We can describe people we’ve known or places we have been much better than imaginary people and places. Early writing exercises often concentrate on memoirs or family histories. For a great many writers, first novels tend to be autobiographical because they are writing what they know, about a younger version of themselves living through a slightly altered version of their own early life.

One person’s life can inspire only so many novels, however. Gradually successful novelists must tap their imaginations for characters they have never known and situations they have never experienced.

Then there are all those stories about things that nobody has known. I'm thinking about sci-fi tales that take place on distant planets or in the distant future, fantasy adventures in strange new worlds and even thrillers where the violence is taken to extreme levels. Sure, some knowledge of people and how they interact with one another is useful in writing such books, but they also require a great deal of imagination.

Cathie Pelletier, in an author's note at the end of her novel The One-Way Bridge, tells of her resistance to one of the main characters in that novel, Harry Plunkett, a Vietnam veteran. The character came to her, she says, in 1991. Her novel was published in 2013. For more than two decades she wrestled with Harry, who had been broken by a war she knew next to nothing about. How could she write about a soldier's experiences in Vietnam, not to mention his nightmares about them in the decades following that war? She wanted to drop the character, yet he was too important to the story she wanted to tell.

"I could not delete Harry Plunkett, nor could I change what he was insisting on remembering, on reliving, on teaching me," she writes. "He was too real to me by then." So she did what good writers do: research. She read histories and memoirs about the Vietnam War until she, too, was haunted by it. One important thing she learned was that veterans' memories of and reactions to their experiences in Vietnam are so varied and often so over-the-top that almost anything she wrote about Harry could seem realistic. Details about such things as places and weapons could always be found in a book somewhere or on the Web. And some details, she realized, don't even matter in a work of fiction.

"Did any soldiers in the Mekong Delta ever hear he coop coop of the Crow Pheasant, or was it only in the Central or Northern Highlands?" she asks. "I don't know. Writers take license at times for the sake of poetry."

Her advice to writers? Don't just write what you know, but write what you should know. That means doing the research until you do know.