Writing What You Don't Know

Hello to new and ongoing subscribers. And salutations to premium members, too. Welcome to Sitting in Silence, the newsletter on creativity, writing, joy, and worry.

All across the nation, flowers are bursting forth from their coverings, birds are tweeting, and hearts are thumping in search of love. You might think I’m talking about spring. Perhaps I am. But did you know that it’s National Poetry Month? That’s right. Our bards are calling forth images from the dream realm for the betterment of our souls. Hats off to them.

In addition to my duties as a professor of creative writing at Louisiana State University, I foolishly agreed to lead a book club for students in the Honor’s College. I didn’t have time for the job, and it was my first time doing something like that, but we had a blast. Over four sessions, we read and discussed a book by the Genius Toni Morrison. I didn’t lecture because that wasn’t the point of the club. But I did have thoughts, some of which made it into this post. I found myself thinking about who gets to write what. As it turns out, Ms. Morrison had thoughts.

By the way, I’ve also finished principal work on my third book, a healthy 250-ish page novel. But there’s always more to do, so I won’t be so silly as to say it’s done. I’ll talk more about it in another post.  

Finally, we’re giving away free copies of the paperback of my second book, the short story collection called The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You. The new cover is beautiful! Enter here: https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/enter_choose_address/343940-the-ones-who-don-t-say-they-love-you-stories

There’s a lost time about a decade ago that I think back on occasionally. Actually, it’s more like 15 years ago because I’m never as young in my head as I am in the world. This is after the early catastrophes of the new millennium (9/11 and the events surrounding Hurricane Katrina) but before the latter new millennium catastrophes of the Great Recession, the reaction to the election of the 44th President, and so forth. I’m talking about 2006 to 2008. During that time, I lost my job, my truck, and my dog. Like in a country song. OK, I’m embellishing for effect. I drove a sedan not a pickup, and I didn’t have a dog. But if I had a dog, well…it probably wouldn’t have worked out.

I wouldn’t have said so then, but I was in a dark night of the soul. I was searching for something and had no sense of direction. So I tried everything. I switched law firms. Switched is a euphemism. My original firm fired me a week or so after the storm. But the new firm was bigger and shinier.

I had a lifelong interest in politics, so I took a politicking class on Monday nights, ran for two local offices and won. It’s less interesting than it sounds. Trust me.

I could play bass guitar and auditioned for three rock bands. This was when America Idol was a cultural phenomenon, so when they asked me in text messages whether I could sing, I said yes. I couldn’t sing then, and I can’t sing now. Needless to say, I did not become a rock legend. This what you do in a dark night of the soul. You flop around in the most embarrassing ways until something clicks.

The real question I was asking then was: who do I get to be? Lawyer, politician, musician, writer?

To be a writer is to wear story. You put on the garments of happenstance, twist of fate, and who would have imagined? Usually, when I write, I avoid autobiography. I understand the resurgence of what we today call autofiction. The author’s life seen through a filter that changes names to protect the innocent. I’m not here to dump on that. If you like it, I love it. But I’m pulled by a different magnet. I’m drawn by everything but myself. I write toward what I don’t know or even understand. Because I want to know it. I want to understand it.

I estimate that roughly half of writers fall into that former category. This is basically me, but with a charming hat. The other half of writers fall into the latter category. I’m not in this story, so don’t try to find me; nothing to see here. There are no stats on this nor should there be. And writers cross from category to category all the time. Even within the same work. From doing a shadow play of what keeps them up at night to writing about strange people in imaginary places.

Toni Morrison was, perhaps, the best at this. There’s a quote of her talking about how we should never write what we know. I never really understood that quote until I read this other quote of hers from the preface of Song of Solomon. 

“The challenge of Song of Solomon was to manage what for me was a radical shift in imagination from a female locus to a male one. To get out of the house, to de-domesticate the landscape that had so far been the site of my work. To travel. To fly. In such an overtly stereotypically male narrative, I thought that straightforward chronology would be more suitable than the kind of play with sequence and time I had employed in my previous novels.”

We look back on Morrison. One of the greatest writers to ever do it. Right up there on Mount Literature with Homer and Shakespeare (and certainly preferred by many over either of those guys). We think she was always a master, always the best on the page. That it was some kind of Black Girl Magic. But what she’s saying is no. She’s telling us that fretting about what she needed to do was a part of her process and that success was not assured. It was a challenge to write a book that was outside of her lived experience for that reason.

I think what she’s asking is: who do I get to be? Books are suprapersonal objects. They exist beyond the human. We can still read a book written a hundred or a thousand years ago. A person in New York and New Brunswick can read the same book at the same time. Authors create these objects that are intimate and full of human feeling, that become our friends, our confidants. I’ve felt that way, we say, but I didn’t know how to put it in words.

Writers who write beyond their personal experience are only able to do this because we give ourselves permission to be other. Morrison is Milkman, Macon, Guitar, Freddie, Hospital Tommy, and all the other men in Song of Solomon because she says yes to the adventure of trying to see them as real people rather than types or constructs. The book is full of women too of course: Ruth, First Corinthians, Magdelena called Lena (love this phrasing), Pilate, Hagar, and Circe. But Morrison could write those ladies using the smallest portion of her considerable gifts. Writing the men was work for her because they were alien to her. It was going to the literary gym or running a literary marathon.

And Mama Toni clearly came to work. I heard she wrote 17 drafts of Solomon. Maybe she did this for all her books. That attention to person and to detail is one of the sources of her considerable power.

I’m no Morrison, but you already know this. Still, whenever I write, by default, I’m looking for those people who are not me. Like Morrison, I want to fly. I want to venture out past the flat planes of my biography. I mean, I’ve lived an interesting enough life so far, but do I actually want to only write books about men who are more or less myself? I’m looking at you: ghosts of Updike, Roth, Bellow, and Nabokov. I love you all, but you know what I’m saying.

I’m from New Orleans. A world-city with a fascinating culture largely based around the cultural production of Haitian descendants, free people of color, Black Creoles, Native Americans, and African Americans. Yet, the first ten New Orleans-centric books or plays that most people can name were written by people who only visited the city. Not natives, and probably not from marginalized communities. (A fraught phrase since the city has been majority Black for most of its history. Yes, even today after 10+ years of heavy gentrification.)

I write about the people I write about because if I don’t those stories, they may not get told. I’m spooked by the possibility of the civilization that made me, simply fading from the earth unnoticed. This is not a unique mission. Most writers are not from places like New York or Los Angeles. Most of us are from the underreported battlefields of human existence. Most of us are from small towns, backwaters, exurbs, and fly over country. So ask yourself: if you don’t write about your community, who will remember them?