What Risks Will You Take?
Do you write only what you know? Or do you write to explore what you don’t know?
It comes down to the purpose of your writing, to you. Is it to expound on what’s known to you, to share your experiences or expertise with readers? Or is it to expand your horizons and examine new territory, let yourself dive into uncharted waters?
Joan Didion famously said, “I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”
Or do you align more with writer Amy Gustine, in Lit Hub: “One day I decided to stop letting fear prevent me from trying to write certain stories, specifically the fear of not knowing things. I didn’t disavow my penchant for realism, or deny the importance of accuracy. Instead, I resolved to find out what I could achieve with research.”
Gustine is talking about “deep research,” the kind of exploring of uncharted seas and the desire to make something previously unknown, known. Then to bring it into your writing.
The past years have seen a strong reaction to this, though, as writers from one culture have tried to bring other cultures into their writing. Men writing from a woman’s point of view. Straight writing gay. Almost anyone writing class or race different from their own. I’ve read so much on this topic. If you haven’t, here’s an article about the fallout from Stockett’s The Help and other books, and another about the reaction to Cummins’ American Dirt. Cummins received threats and her book, which sold 48,000 copies the first week, was pulled by the publisher. A Vox article said, “Cummins had written a story that was not hers — and, according to many readers of color, she didn’t do a very good job of it.”
Lately, I’ve been hearing more writers talk about this backlash as going too far. That the line isn’t so clear for many. One of my favorite discussions comes (again) from Lit Hub: how one writing instructor responded to a student’s concerns, showing how complex the issue is.
Do we write only what we know, as in this George Booth cartoon from The New Yorker? Or do we write to explore, to sail uncharted waters, to bring back new insights and ideas to enrich our lives?
Types of appropriation
On February 17, Becky Tuch’s Lit Mag News, a wonderful Substack publication for writers submitting fiction and nonfiction to literary journals, opened the topic for discussion. Her post, entitled “What does it mean when writers "appropriate" from other cultures? How can editors handle these works artfully?” presented both sides of this complicated picture in a lively conversation of 102 comments.
This and other discussions these past months show a growing question about the strict rules some are proposing: write only what you know personally. I’m struggling with that idea in my own work—how about you?
While I can understand the huge risk of writing about a race or culture you don’t have a personal relationship with, because despite best intentions and good research you may create maligning stereotypes and present it in a reduced way, I also think writers need to explore beyond their own lives to bring new insights about the human experience. Art has always done this. To me, writing is all about exploring beyond your own life experiences. Yes, for me this includes being extremely aware of lines not to cross, of the potential that we may not authentically portray what is not our own experience (the dogs, above), but I strongly feel that each must decide the line’s location for themselves.
For me, I’ve worked it out into areas of unknown territory that I can and cannot manage honestly in my work.
What risks will you take?
To me, nonfiction books are easy to figure out where my line is—and their risk is a known one. I have worked too long as a journalist to venture into unfamiliar territory without extensive research and the attempt to give a full perspective on the topic. Even in my food journalism, I presented my own experience, the advice of experts I relied on, and tested information and recipes. When I wrote memoir and prescriptive nonfiction (how-to and self-help), I brought in interviews and experts again, to cover territory I was not personally familiar with. This was and is accepted.
Fiction took me to wide-open spaces, and into more risk, of course. I leaned on the story for ideas of where to go. But I never had the call to venture much outside known territory in terms of class, race, culture—the most tricky topics of the appropriation argument. I risk in topic, the subject of my stories. And I risk bigtime.
I couldn’t NOT explore situations I knew nothing about—so all three of my novels became simultaneously risk-filled and exciting propositions. I worried about doing enough research. I worried if I bolstered my unknowing with too many facts that dulled down the story tension. I relied on agent and editorial and proofreader examination to test my accuracy, but long before that I solicited help from experts who did have experience with what I wrote about.
Writing outside of my personal wheelhouse demanded a LOT more work than if I just wrote about dogs, which is a topic quite close at hand. Here’s a brief account of the areas of risk I chose for my three novels (my short stories are another story entirely).
In my first novel, Qualities of Light, the main character’s brother is in a boating accident and falls into a coma. I’ve never been in a coma, I don’t have any friends or relatives who have. I also don’t have any experience with boating accidents.
In my second novel, A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue, there’s a small plane crash and a Search & Rescue operation. Flying is new to me—I just took my first lessons after my novel was in pre-publication, too late to change anything. I lived across the street from a SAR ground worker but we didn’t discuss her work; I never experienced SAR myself.
In my third novel, Last Bets, to be published on April 21, there’s a high-stakes backgammon tournament, a storm sailing scene with an accident, and portrait painting. I am not a gambler at all, I’ve played backgammon but never for money, and I’ve never sailed in a storm or painted a portrait.
Yet all these topics called to me. So much so, in fact, that I was willing to do the onerous work of making sure I stood on solid ground with facts about them. But I wondered, as I worked harder than I ever imagined, why I would do this? Why take the risk of writing about these foreign-to-me topics?
Emotional resonance
i can say now, looking back on these three novels, that each topic I explored had a certain emotional resonance for me. Even if I hadn’t personally lived through the situation I wrote about, I emotionally was drawn to it because of something similar in my life.
An obvious link was my mom being a pilot; I have always been fascinated with flying so I was able to make the leap to learn about it.
Another link: the week spent at a dive resort when I was in my thirties. The resort hosted small-time backgammon games with big-time stakes. A fellow guest told me the story of losing his yacht in such a game and that amazed me.
A third link: I lost my sister unexpectedly, so the accident that almost cost Molly her brother had emotions that were definitely familiar to me.
Behind each topic, I felt this emotional tug, pulling me to it. I couldn’t let it go. I wanted the easier job of writing those dogs, but I couldn’t stop wanting to explore these uncharted seas.
Isn’t that why we write, and how we come to write about something unknown to our personal experience?
When mistakes happen
Despite months of research, careful editing and proofreading, there’s bound to be mistakes. I’ve found them in two of the three books, one after publication and another just before.
The one post-pub was hard on me, the one found pre-pub was a great relief. I tell you this because mistakes happen. It is inevitable, really.
Not long after A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue was published, it was featured in a book roundup in Adirondack Life magazine—a thrill for me, since the story takes place in those mountains of upper New York state. Local libraries ordered the book and one came into the hands of a woman who was on the local Search & Rescue team. She wrote me about a factual error that had slipped by me, my editor, and our eagle-eyed proofreader. Her email was kind, but the mistake, as understandable as it was, caused me a lot of embarrassment for a few days.
I had consulted with three Search & Rescue experts, who had read the scenes and helped me get everything right. This mistake was in another section of the book—the choice of clothing that Kate wears to go out in the woods. We caught it with Red, the other main character, saving her from hypothermia by changing her jeans to nylon cargo pants which dry quickly. But from a Search & Rescue point of view, cotton (jeans) equals potential death in the wilderness. “Cotton kills,” so they say.
My first reaction was to ignore the email, pretend I hadn’t gotten it. But after a few days, I decided to respond honestly and acknowledge the mistake, tell the reader that we’d corrected the same error elsewhere but missed this one, and that kind of awkward oops! was terribly hard for any writer to learn about. Especially for me, an editor for two decades myself.
I also said I hoped that error didn’t ruin the story for her.
She wrote back immediately saying she loved the book and had read it over one weekend.
I mentioned how long and extensively I research when I am writing unknown topics. I also have to thank and rely on my experts, more than myself. I don’t know how many writers do this, but from my journalism yeas, I knew I had to.
Getting more help (at the last minute)
I was helped from an even more disastrous mistake by one of my launch team members, when Last Bets was first sent out in galleys.
Again, it had been through my own fact checking, editorial, and proofreading. But I hadn’t done enough research, it turned out, about storm sailing. I’d sailed, and in some bad weather, but never in the open ocean and never in a tropical storm. I won’t spoil the story by sharing too many details here, but my launch team helper put me in touch with a friend of hers who has sailed around the world and knows more about boats than anyone I’ve ever met.
She was kind enough to read through my chapters about the storm at sea. I expected to have a few suggestions but she sent pages of them—and a good thing too! There were errors of fact and timing and sequence. And also, my character who gets in trouble during the storm would not have lived, had I gone with my earlier version.
I was beyond grateful, properly embarrassed, and tried not to think what would’ve happened if the book went to print as it was. It showed me once again the value of expert advice when you reach into topics you don’t know that well.
But looking back I also know I could never restrict myself to writing only about topics within my own backyard. I write to learn, after all. And if I have experts on hand, I feel safe in venturing widely.
Your Weekly Writing Exercise
Read the discussion in Lit Mag News: “What does it mean when writers "appropriate" from other cultures? How can editors handle these works artfully?” You may need to subscribe, but that’s a very good thing—this is a wonderful publication (free options available too).
What’s the line you walk as a writer, in terms of writing what you don’t know? What do you need to stay clear of, what do you risk and try?