Life Imitating Art

(Or Write What You Know?)

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I have long hated the old writing adage ‘write what you know’, mainly because if I was to write what I know, I think I - and the reader - would find it pretty boring (mum, wife, Friends lover, a person who has watched Dirty Dancing until the end wore out - yes, I’m that old). I don’t write to learn about my world that I live (and love) in every day. I write to escape it, to explore, to learn about the world through my character’s eyes. So I have long said nah to that ‘rule’ (along with many others). I’ll write what I love - dark places, a spirit or two, characters with big hearts and all the desires.

But then the other morning I was having a little WhatsApp chat with my lovely friend, Jennifer Kennedy (find her here), all about writing the blurb and pitch before we write a single word of our stories (something I strongly recommend). She realised that she has a theme running through all of her stories (I won’t give this away) and I realised that I do, too. The theme that is central to everything I have so-far written is HOME. And suddenly, ‘write what you know’ made much more sense to me.

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I am quite a literal person, as you might gather, and I think I had taken that rule to mean literally write your world as you see it, stay in your lane. But of course, there is more to it than that, and there is much more to me than loving Friends to a point of obsession.

Home has always been something transient for me. We rarely stayed anywhere long enough for it to feel truly like home, with the exception of Milton Keynes where I ended up spending the biggest chunk of my life - seventeen years. I think this is why I get quite defensive of the place full of roundabouts (best things ever!) and a ‘city’ that was never really a city at all. But I’m actually a northerner, born and raised in Blackpool before Sydney called, briefly. Then back to Blackpool before MK. Let’s throw in Derby, Burton-on-Trent, London, Flitwick, and now the Fylde Coast, and we are back almost full-circle. I often joke with my mum about the fact that I attended FIVE primary schools - that’s almost one school per year - but really this must have had an effect on me. Not that I see this as a bad thing, mind you. I think it’s character-building, I think it lends itself to being something quite unique to me, and it was always under the umbrella of love, never fear. I loved going home after school, no matter where that home was.

But I wonder if my version of ‘home’ is what has left me with so many questions that I am answering through my stories?

And so we come to the fiction I write, where place is absolutely central to everything. I actually have the setting before anything else. Setting informs characters, who then inform plot. That is my process. In my first book, a Southern Gothic tale set in the Appalachian Mountains, ‘home’ is an actual homestead where bad things are happening. A twin sister has died and through the story we discover that the danger actually lies in the home, and home is a very unsafe place for my protagonist. Core to this story, and in opposition of most other Southern Gothic tales where characters are desperate to leave, my main character, Grace, is desperate to stay. She is desperate to make her home safe again.

I believe this comes back to what I said above - home was always a place of love and of safety. In my ghost-filler holler, Grace is me. She is doing exactly what I would do - banish the demon, no matter what form they take.

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On to book two, which I am currently editing with my agent, and home for my protagonist is something very different. It’s an arctic island, isolated (another common theme in my writing), and she is part of a community who don’t accept her. Her love is only for the place, not for the people. I guess this is me looking at ‘community’ and the importance of that in people’s lives. The best community I ever knew was in Milton Keynes - Bletchley, to be specific - where doors were always open and neighbours walked in and out all day long. It was very hard to feel lonely there, and I can imagine being on the periphery of that would have been very hard. I can’t say too much about this book because I’m hoping it will be going on submission soon, but I guess the central question might be what is the point of home if it doesn’t feel like you belong? I am all for packing up and finding somewhere better (I can tell you now, we won’t stay on the Fylde Coast forever!). Call me nomadic, if you like.

Photo by Bernd 📷 Dittrich on Unsplash

And finally, book three, which is in the planning stages. And would you believe it even has the word HOME in the title? I don’t think there is any denying that home is a big part of me, be that what is was for me, and what it wasn’t. What I got from home, and what I didn’t. What staying put might have felt like, and what I got from being more transient. I think it made me braver than I might have been? I’m slightly risk-averse, but I don’t take much persuading to try something new. I also believe I’m quite ‘global’ in that I’ve seen a lot of places and a lot of communities and had many different types of friends along the way. This is definitely something that comes out in my fiction. Why write about my own boring world when there is so much more out there to explore?

So ‘write what you know’ might actually be a thing, hey? I don’t see it as a rule, as such, more that what we are, our lived experiences, are bound to come through into our fiction in organic ways such as I’ve described. And isn’t it all the more richer for it?

Let me know if you have noticed common themes in your writing that maybe you hadn’t spotted as being personal to you and your world.

And happy writing!