Write what you know

Write what you know

A person who had spent his whole life in Nebraska would rarely write a successful story of an ocean voyage. Unless he had read widely, and perhaps even if he had, he would be almost sure to make absurd blunders which would betray his inexperience. No more ought an Ohioan without experience in the mountains to try to write a story of the Rockies or of Alaska. An easterner generally makes his wild west a great deal too wild. If one wishes to write a story whose plot is laid on the Sahara Desert or in Constantinople, he needs to be pretty sure that he knows his region before he begins. College students are living in a unique environment, yet ordinarily, instead of accepting the material at hand and writing of the complications of college life, they prefer to stretch their imaginations across states, if not across the length and breadth of a continent, for the sake of novelty. Kipling wrote of India, Bret Harte, of California, and we all wish to go and do likewise. Kipling, however, knew his India through intimate experience. Bret Harte knew his California. Therein is a difference. If one must write of the unfamiliar, one should read, study his chosen environment until he can live there imaginatively as easily as he can in flesh and blood at home. Then he should make the environment as colorless as possible. He may thus avoid glaring mistakes. The same principle applies to stories written with an historical background. They must be handled carefully, if at all. After all,

it is easier to write of one’s own country, one’s own surroundings, and one’s own time.

The reader, however, enjoys novelty — of all sorts; novelty of treatment, novelty of character, novelty of incident, novelty of setting. It is true, of course, that underneath all this strangeness he does wish to behold the sameness of human nature at its root. It is certain that he likes to be able to say at times, “I might have done that, ” or “I once had an experience something like that. ” He likes to see his own motives and manners mirrored, just as he boosts his pride a little whenever the name of his forsaken hamlet is mentioned in a city paper. Yet familiarity may at length grow tiresome. We are all interested in what other people are like, what they are doing, what strange adventures they have had. We like to know what other people have done that we have never succeeded in doing, and, at times, we like, as did the Pharisee, to congratulate ourselves that we “are not as other men. ” Thus the story depicting the life and manners of men and women the like of which we have never known, has a perennial interest. Kipling has said: “Tell them first of those things that thou hast seen and they have seen together. Thus their knowledge will piece out thy imperfections. Tell them of what thou alone hast seen, then what thou hast heard, and since they be children, tell them of battles and kings, horses, devils, elephants, and angels, but omit not to tell them of love and such like. ”