On Writing What You Know
Most of the books I write take place in a small town. It's where I grew up and where I'm most comfortable putting characters. They move around most naturally there because they know what they're supposed to do and how they're supposed to act.
I'm having lunch today at The Hub, my town's place to go for a home-cooked meal that won't leave your wallet feeling empty but will leave your stomach full. It's the kind of place that lists peach cobbler on the white board of daily lunch specials under Today's Vegetables. I'm okay with that because every once in a while it helps justify the choice.
[image error]This time, I'm being good though and having the Vegetarian Omelet and iced tea. The waitress who takes my order has no doubt been the template for a number of secondary characters in my books. I guess it has to be true that I've written about this place under one fictitious name or another a good number of times.
Doesn't every small town have one? The diner/cafe/locally owned place that's been around a couple of generations - a spot where you're guaranteed to know most of the people there by face if not by name. For me, there's a cozy kind of comfort in that, both in real life and within the pages of a story. A place where characters know and are known, where they stop in for an update on what's going on in the community.
Write what you know. This was the advice given to me by teachers in my pre-published years of writing. It wasn't that I exactly disagreed with them, but wasn't what I knew boring and mundane, the same kind of thing everyone else knew? Wouldn't it be much more exciting and interesting if I wrote about places like Paris and St. John, Florence and Munich?
To answer my own question, maybe, if they're what I know.
Over the years, I've had the good fortune to visit each of those places, and one of the things I learned from going there is that visiting isn't the same thing as living. I've experienced those beautiful spots a slice at a time, but I don't know them like I know my own corner of the world.
If my characters feel real to a reader, I think it's because I've put them in a life that is real to me in all its seemingly everyday normalcy, quirks, curiosities and all. As writers, what might seem routine and not terribly exciting to us can be the exact opposite to our readers when we paint our story with a brush of details that give it color and life. The red Formica tops of a diner booth. The stainless steel stools with the royal blue cushions kids like to spin on. The Peppermint Pattie jar that sits by the cash register.[image error]
So as I sit here, absorbing the bustle of a regular old Monday at The Hub, I realize how nice it is to belong in a place. And as a writer, to be able to write stories that come from a place in me that get their truth from the life I live here. From what I know.
I didn't order the homemade coconut pie today. But I really wanted to.
