/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.13273339]

>Write what you know: a very bad and crippling advice

https://lithub.com/should-you-write-what-you-know-31-authors-weigh-in/


Toni Morrison: You Don’t Know Anything

“I may be wrong about this, but it seems as though so much fiction, particularly that by younger people, is very much about themselves. Love and death and stuff, but my love, my death, my this, my that. Everybody else is a light character in that play.

When I taught creative writing at Princeton, [my students] had been told all of their lives to write what they knew. I always began the course by saying, “Don’t pay any attention to that.” First, because you don’t know anything and second, because I don’t want to hear about your true love and your mama and your papa and your friends. Think of somebody you don’t know. What about a Mexican waitress in the Rio Grande who can barely speak English? Or what about a Grande Madame in Paris? Things way outside their camp. Imagine it, create it. Don’t record and editorialize on some event that you’ve already lived through. I was always amazed at how effective that was. They were always out of the box when they were given license to imagine something wholly outside their existence. I thought it was a good training for them. Even if they ended up just writing an autobiography, at least they could relate to themselves as strangers.”

–from an interview with Rebecca Gross at the NEA Arts Magazine

[Anonymous No.13273359]

>>13273339
i skipped them all except hemingway, and he said write what you know

[Anonymous No.13273371]

>>13273359

He couldn't write about war, then. He didn't saw or take part in teh real action. Latter he admited he learned how to write about war by rerading Tolstoy, and Tolstoy used Stendhal and Victor Hugo as sources to learn how to write about war. Vicotr Hugo himslef didn't saw real war.

So there you have it.

[Anonymous No.13273376]

>>13273339
>You Don’t Know Anything

I swear, every time I see someone utter those words, they always mean that I don't know anything. It's never about the person speaking them.

I like to break it down like this:

I know (this first part is for me, I don't go further than this) that I know nothing (this part is for the audience, so they start questioning their beliefs and, ideally, start accepting mine)

But I like Brecht's version much better: I know that I know know nothing, until I studied.

[Anonymous No.13273407]

>>13273371
he said invent from what you know. writers can only edit their experience.

so, as they say, there it is.

[Anonymous No.13273746]

>>13273339

thanks for this link. It's a relief for me