Write What You Know?
On Writing, Jersey and Mobster Memories
Write what you know. At 19 I tried that, but writing too close, too soon, about trauma is not healthy for the manuscript or the writer. That was a disaster and it took me years to recover from it.
Later in life, I tried again. I knew my favorite authors wrote what they knew. But what did I know? I wrote my life then, a romance of two coworkers from different cultures, working on software in the early internet days in the Bell Labs/ Bellcore workplace, in the NJ landscape that I was sure no one cared about. The heroine’s biggest fear (like my own in my young marriage) was the hero would want to move back to where he had grown up, far from NJ and her. But she, being a Jersey Girl, could never follow him. My writing group, most of whom were not Jersey, thought this was preposterous. Why wouldn’t someone not want to move out of NJ? Even those from Jersey thought no one outside Jersey would get it. Jersey is a joke said one, it’s a punch line. Readers will laugh, thinking it’s a parody. I added a few more reasons she couldn’t move, changed NJ to PA, but it didn’t feel right.
I tried again. Another romance, set again in a landscape I know, the Jersey Shore. This time I didn’t hold back on the location. I embraced it. The setting was intertwined with the plot and the characters so closely that, I’m proud to say, it won Best Novel by NJ author by NJ Romance Writers. It was a story that could only be told by a NJ author.
Meanwhile, I started to realize that friends (and my husband) who hadn’t grown up in Jersey were fascinated by stories of my childhood. To me it was normal to shop for clothes from Tony the Fence’s garage, and know the yard full of spotlighted saints was home to a mobster snitch, who told the babysitter to never answer the door. When I had to rewatch Goodfellas to figure out if a certain memory was mine or from Scorsese, I figured I had material for my third novel.
Now I write what I know, always. What they don’t tell you is that means having enough distance and wisdom to be able to write it, especially if it’s traumatic.
What’s your experience writing with writing what you know?
This post is in response to a post today by Greer Macallister on Writer’s Unboxed about writing rules.