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WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW
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Ask any writer you know -- and if you don’t know any writers, you really should find yourself one; they’re gold at dinner parties -- what piece of sage advice they hold close to their heart when they sit down in front of the blank page, nine times out of ten you’ll hear: Write What You Know (and the other ten-percent?: avoid run-on sentences with highly inaccurate and inappropriate punctuation.)
Write What You Know.
Thus was launched an infinity of dreary and insufferable novels, short stories, poems, screenplays, song lyrics and more than a few librettos. A corollary should be added to stanch further creative bleeding. Write What You Know But.. But.. (and this is the important part, so listen very carefully).. not about your painful first ever break up where you learned the true meaning of love (hint: selflessness not selfishness) or.. not about your dysfunctional relationship with your parents where the only solace you found in a sterile household was with your mangy dog, Leopold. No, no, no.
Write What You Know is, in fact, a plea to elevate and broaden your writing to a place others find engaging, surprising, stimulating, uproariously funny. It is not an empty catch phrase that permits pedestrian observations on mundane, everyday goings-on to pass as acceptable entertainment.
The truly vital piece of advice every writer should learn in any creative writing course is this. Aside from yourself, your family and maybe a small circle of friends, your life isn’t all that interesting. Most people don’t want to hear much about it over a couple pints let alone wade through three hundred pages of it. Even those who actually lead interesting lives, like say, Gandhi or Sir Edmund Hillary, are better served having someone else write about their lives. Someone who has spent time learning the craft of writing rather than scaling mountains or bringing down an empire, both noble pursuits in their own right. Writers create. They don’t take down minutes.
On a recent trip to Japan, I spent two days in Hiroshima. It is a city renowned for insanely demonstrative baseball fans, superlative seafood and a flat, egg pancake concoction known as an okonomi. And, oh yeah. On the morning of August 6th, 1945, the place was leveled by an atomic bomb. In the immediate vicinity directly beneath the blast’s hypocentre, now lies the Peace Memorial Park, a tree-lined, 30 square block or so open-air commemorative that oozes an unsettling serenity. A plea for pacifism and a call for a nuclear free world permeate the Memorial’s vibe.
Thinking myself a relatively well-informed student of history, I accepted as fact the conventional wisdom that the American led Allies had only resorted to the use of the atomic bomb -- oops, I mean, bombs -- because of the obstinate Japanese refusal to surrender in the face of obvious defeat. To save the lives of countless G.I.s fighting island-to-island to bring Japan to its knees, the victors would have to reluctantly unleash “Little Boy” on an unsuspecting population.
It seems Japan had made overtures of surrender not long after it’s Axis partner, Nazi Germany, collapsed earlier in the year. Unfortunately, they turned to the Soviet Union who was maintaining a neutrality pact with them to discuss terms. The Allies, having viewed Stalin’s land grab of a good chunk of Eastern Europe in the wake of Germany’s surrender dimly, wanted to make sure the same thing didn’t happen in the Pacific. Boom goes Hiroshima. The Soviets counter by declaring war and invading Manchuria in Japan-held China. Boom goes Nagasaki. Yes, sir, Mr. Truman-san, where do you want me to sign?
60, 000+ people dead in the immediate aftermath of the bomb, 80, 000 or so more by the end of the year and another 80, 000 killed in Nagasaki, at least in part due to a twisted real politic of establishing the global upper hand in the post-war world.
Hmmm.. Call me stupid, call me ignorant but I did not know that.
Less than 20 years after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Republican candidate for President of the United States openly mused about the use of nuclear weapons to sort out what was a growing quagmire in Vietnam. He was dubbed insane and suffered a landslide defeat. Sixteen years after that, an actual Republican President wondered aloud if it were possible to win a limited nuclear war. More than a few eyebrows were raised but the congenial old man was allowed to remain in office, shaky finger poised over “the” button. Twenty odd years on, another Republican administration, having already run amok in one hapless Middle-Eastern country, seriously deliberates (apparently with little or no irony) using a nuclear bunker busting bomb to stop alleged nuclear proliferation in another country it has taken a dislike to. The intellengtsia nod their collective heads, expressing a view that this might not be unreasonable.
Within two generations, we have apparently forgotten the nuclear horrors inflicted on Japan. Reasonable people have abandoned their posts, allowing the power-mad, the historical revisionists, the criminal ideologues to play madly at the levers of powers, unsupervised. Unless we do something to rectify this, we are in peril. Us, our children, their children.
This I know.
Bringing us back, with a wide, wandering U-turn, to our original premise. (Thought I forgot, didn’t you.)
Write What You Know.
But, for God’s sake, Know More, Know Better.
