I must be a born rebel. When it comes to fiction-writing rules, I just can’t seem to help but break them—at least some of them, at least some of the time.
“Write what you know,” the old saying goes. Every writer has heard it at least a hundred times. And it makes sense to write about what you know about, what you’ve had experience with. I mean, how can you argue with such sage advice?
You can’t. Because it’s good advice and we all know it. What we don’t always know is exactly what it means to “write what you know.” Does it mean that if you are a man you can never write about a female protagonist? That if you live in the 21st Century you can’t write about ancient Rome? That if you are forty years old you can’t write about someone who is eighty?
Obviously not. These excursions into the unknown have been accomplished quite successfully by many different authors at many different times. But can a southern American novelist write convincingly about a male Australian architect when said novelist is a woman who has never studied architecture and has hardly ever even met any Aussies, much less been to Australia?
Well, one doesn’t know till one tries, right? And in my defense as the author of such a novel, I can only say that it was a great relief when Alan, an Aussie architect I became friends with soon after I finished the first draft of said novel, read it and told me no one would think I hadn’t at least lived in Australia for a few years. But the real kicker was when Tess, my British agent who had been married to an Aussie and had lived in Sydney for three years, assumed upon reading the manuscript that I, too, was an Australian.
Still, one of the most emotionally scary times of my life was when Alan, who was now helping me vet the book from a male Australian architect’s point of view, told me he didn’t like one of the early scenes in the book. My main character, Britt, was not well-defined, Alan said, and didn’t “feel right” to him. He suggested I rewrite a portion of the scene, which involved getting directly inside Britt’s head.
While I, with more than a little trepidation, set about doing so, Alan remained in the adjacent room, waiting for me to finish. Talk about pressure! Here I was, a mere woman, trying to think the most intimate thoughts of a young Aussie male. What hubris! Whatever had I been thinking to write such a book in the first place? And now I was going to have to show these intimate thoughts to this man I barely knew in person.
Oh, please, never mind that we are on the second floor, just let it open up and drop me down now!
But of course, the floor held firm, and there seemed nothing else for me to do but get on with it. And so I did.
Thirty minutes later, I presented my handiwork to Alan and held my breath while he read it. And then—wait for it—he looked up at me with a big smile and said, “Yes.”
“What do you mean, ‘yes’?” I asked, still cowering behind my invisible shield.
“I mean yes, that’s it,” he said. “You got it.”
Sometime during those years when I was writing this now award-winning novel that I supposedly shouldn’t have been writing, I heard a radio interview with a famous author whom I had read and admired say, “To write about what you know is to write what’s in your heart.”
Yes, of course, I did a lot of research before writing my Australian novel, but I don’t think that’s what made it seem authentic to Alan and Tess. What made it seem honest and real was not that I was writing about “my own backyard” but that I was writing what was in my heart. And if you do that, you can’t go wrong.
© 2022 Ann Henry, all rights reserved.
Photo: The Truth Is in Your Heart © 2011 Jim Henry, all rights reserved.