The Southeast Review Online

Living the Motley Life

by Tim Chapman

Write What You Know?

The proposition put forth by John Barr, president of the Poetry Foundation, is that writers need to work outside academia to gain a broader perspective on life and, consequently, appeal to a broader audience. This is a variant on the old “write what you know” aphorism. I think the statement is accurate… to a point.

O. Henry

One of the fathers of the American short story, O. Henry (William Sydney Porter), held jobs as a clerk, pharmacist, draftsman, bank teller, cowboy, reporter and publisher. When the bank he had worked for accused him of embezzlement, he ran off to Honduras. He traveled extensively in South and Central America where he hung out with train robber, Al Jennings. When he heard that his wife was ill, Porter returned and, found guilty, spent three years in jail. His wife died shortly before he was imprisoned. These experiences shaped Porter’s fiction and it was in prison that he began writing the tales that made him one of the most popular authors of his day. His work is generally denigrated today for being contrived and sappy, but his life was a rich and diverse canvas of experience. I beg you, for the sake of your vocation as a writer, to put aside whatever prejudice you have against schmaltz and read O. Henry’s “The Green Door”, not as an example of good writing, but as a prescription for living.

Truth

There’s been a lot of debate recently about the ratio of truth versus “made up crap” a writer should use when writing creative non-fiction, but I haven’t heard much discussion about truth in fiction or poetry. Readers assume that fiction and poetry are inventions of the author, but the best fiction and poetry is brimming with truth. If you want to write about a guy who shucks oysters for a living, you can research oyster shucking at the library, or interview an oyster shucker, or Google “oyster shucking knives” (a blogger in Massachusetts recommends OXO Good Grips knives) to find out the details of the profession. You may never have dabbed an oyster with horseradish, let alone shucked one, but you could still write a believable piece… unless that oyster shucker is in pain because the rough shells are shredding his naked hands. Maybe he was once a skilled surgeon whose life was ruined when his hand slipped during an operation and barehanded oyster shucking is his self-imposed penance for losing a patient. How do you get your character to communicate his guilt, despair and pain to the reader if you haven’t experienced those feelings yourself? That’s the “write what you know” part.

The Secret

I am now going to give you the super-secret key to being a good writer. You will probably read it and say, “Phoo, Chapman, I’ve known that for years.” That may be, but if you are honest with yourself, you struggle with it, as I do, every time you sit down to write. I’m typing this statement in bold so there’s no way for you, my literary compadre, to miss it’s importance— Good writing is the successful communication of a truth. There, I’ve said it, and not one of my instructors in the Master’s in creative writing program told me about this. In retrospect, it seems self-evident, but I’ve read plenty of stories in workshops where the writer was trying to convince me that there was significance in his or her gossamer. Literary trickery can’t substitute for honesty.

Dig Deeper

Emotion is the product of experience. This doesn’t mean that you have to become a surgeon and mess up an operation to write the oyster shucker story (please, don’t). Like a method actor, drawing on his own experiences to influence his portrayal of a character, you can draw on your own experience. Dig deep inside, find that joy, fear or pain, and examine it. Communicating it to your reader is where craft comes in.

Tim Chapman is a former forensic scientist for the Chicago police department, who now writes advertising copy for a living. He is also a student in Northwestern University's MCW program. He lives in Chicago with a woman and a dog but doesn't see them much because he's working on his thesis. He is an artist, scientist, martial artist and writer who wishes he could play the saxophone.

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