The difficulty of writing out of one’s experience can be vividly demonstrated in the field of genre fiction. In my own bailiwick of crime fiction, for example, I’m at a loss from the standpoint of experience. I have never been a private detective like Joe Gores, a cop like Joseph Wambaugh, or a district attorney like George V. Higgins. Neither have I worked the other side of the street and spent time in the clink like Malcolm Braly and Al Nussbaum — not yet, anyway.
All the same, I find myself using my own background and experience every time I go to work. Just as often, I find myself using what I don’t know — putting to work a combination of research and fakery to furnish what my own background and experience cannot supply.
Let’s take them in turn. How can you put your own presumably ordinary background and experience to work for you? Here are a few ways to make use of what you already know.
Shape your story line to fit your personal knowledge and experience. Let’s hearken back for a moment to the gothic novel we examined in outline form in an earlier chapter. Remember the premise? “A young widow is hired to catalogue the antique furniture in a house on the moors in Devon....” Perhaps you might have come up with just that plot after having done some studying of the gothic category. There’s only one trouble. You don’t know Louis Quinze from Weird Louie the Plumber, you don’t know moors from marshmallows, and the closest you’ve been to Devon is St. Joe, Mo.
It might seem as though the obvious answer is to write about a weird Missouri plumber with a passion for marshmallows, but the resultant manuscript might be tricky to place with an editor of gothics. A less radical solution calls for examining your plot line and seeing how you can adapt it to fit what you’ve got going for you.
You say you don’t know zip about antique furniture? Well, that’s okay, but what do you know about? Rare books? Maybe your heroine has been hired to catalogue the ancestral library. Have you got some background in fine art? Maybe she was hired to clean and restore paintings, or to evaluate them or something. Is there some sort of collectible with which you have a fair degree of familiarity? Rare stamps or coins? Old porcelain? Nineteenth-century patent medicine bottles? Roman glass? Oceanic art? A good many plots are almost infinitely adaptable in this fashion, and it doesn’t take too much in the way of ingenuity to discover a means of channeling such a story to fit whatever expertise you can furnish.
Use familiar settings for your material. Let’s say you haven’t wandered far afield from St. Joe, Mo. Or Butte or Buffalo or Bensonhurst. How are you going to write this story about the young widow on the Devonshire moors and make it authentic?
First thing you can do is decide whether or not your story really has to take place in Devon. Maybe there’s a lonely house on the outskirts of St. Joseph that could serve as the setting for your story as well as any creaking windswept old manse in the West of England. Maybe there’s no such place in reality, but you can build one in your imagination readily enough. Maybe you can readily figure out how people living in such a house, and warped by the strains and stresses built into your basic plot, would relate to and interact with the local people in St. Joseph, much as those moor dwellers in your original outline would relate to the townspeople in Devon. In short, maybe you can transplant all the significant elements of your plot into your own native soil.
If you can manage this, you won’t be cheating; on the contrary, you’ll simply be making the story that much more your own, one that derives from your own experience and reflects your own perceptions. Perhaps any of a hundred writers could turn out an acceptable book about an imagined Devon moor, but how many could write your story of an old farmhouse on the outskirts of your own town, occupied now by the descendants of the original inhabitants, the farm acreage sold off piece by piece over the years, the house itself surrounded by suburban tract houses, but still awesome and forbidding, and....
See?
On the other hand, maybe there’s a reason why your book has to take place in Devon, because of some particular plot component which you regard as intrinsic to the story you want to write. Just as a writer of westerns is locked into setting his books in the old west, you must set this book in Devon.
Fine. As we’ll see shortly, there’s a great deal you can do by way of research to make your setting authentic. But there’s also a way in which you can exploit your own background in order to construct a setting halfway around the world.
You may not know moors from marshmallows, but if you’ve crossed the Central Plains you may recall the sense of infinite space, the loneliness, the uninterrupted flatness. You may have had a similar feeling in the desert. Or you may have experienced a comparable sense of isolation in terrain that has no similarity whatsoever to the moors — the North Woods, say, or smack in the middle of a milling Times Square crowd, or sealed into your own car on a high-speed freeway. The location itself doesn’t matter much. Search into your own bag of past experience, using your past like a Method actor, selecting something that will supply you not with circumstances identical to what you’re writing about but with equivalent feelings.
Similarly, you can pick a house you know and plunk it down on the moors. Your research may have told you that you need a beamed Tudor dwelling, and indeed you may so describe the house in your narrative. Once you get past the beams, however, you can fill in with details of that house down the road that all the kids were scared of when you were in grade school.
Explore your background and experience as a source for story ideas. Earlier, when we talked about reading and analysis, we saw how familiarity with a genre trains the mind to come up with plot ideas suitable for that genre. Similarly, the study you do and the perception you have of yourself as a writer should result in your sifting your background for elements that will prove useful in your writing.
Once when I was in high school I came home one afternoon to find that my mother had left the place locked. I went around and crawled in through the milk chute, an accomplishment which looked to be as likely as slipping a camel through the eye of a needle, given the tiny dimensions of the milk chute and the unpleasantly plump dimensions of the embryonic author. I was to repeat this procedure on numerous occasions when the door was unlocked, for the entertainment of friends and relatives, and I can still recall squirming through that hole in the wall and landing upside down in a confusion of mops and brooms and scrub buckets; the milk chute, unused since the war, opened into a cluttered broom closet.
Nowadays I write books about a burglar. (Perhaps the seed was planted all those many years ago, when I first discovered the thrill of illicit entry.) I’ve written three novels to date about Bernie Rhodenbarr without making use of that milk-chute entrance, but I recalled it a week or so ago, and this time I saw it from the stance of one who writes about burglary. I immediately saw any number of ways such a bit of business could fit into a novel about a burglar, and I let my mind play with the possibilities, and I filed them all away in the cluttered broom closet I call a mind; someday I’ll quite probably get some use out of it.