Write What You Know

This week is a tough one in my world. My father passed away unexpectedly on October 2, 2018. Exactly one week before his 70th birthday on October 9th. Each year, we get to relive that awful, horrible week. Even if we make it through the first anniversary day relatively unscathed (which I have yet to figure out how to do), the second comes so close on its heels that it doesn’t matter.

I wrote about grief a little bit on Instagram on Monday as I muddled my way through horrible day number one.

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A post shared by Monica Cox | Certified Book Coach + Writer (@monicacoxwrites)

I hesitated before I posted. Why was I posting this deeply personal thing in such a public forum?

Because it’s real.

Real to me.

Real to who I am.

Real to how I was showing up in the world on Monday. And honestly throughout this week.

And, based on the comments and DMs I received, very real to so many others.

In writing circles, the advice is often to write what you know. I think that is often misconstrued to mean write only of the physical experiences you know–the job you know, the family you know, the community you know.

But writing fiction is about telling the truth.

Right? I know.

But if you focus on the truth of what you know, that deep down universal thing, it transcends the scene, the circumstances, the exterior coating of your story.

Take my post for instance. Grief is specific. Every person, every relationship, every loss is so different. And yet, in writing about my specific loss, others recognized their own. While the relationships or anniversaries or time since the loss all differed, my underlying truth of having a love with no place to land resonated with others. Maybe not everyone, but many.

There are many things you know to be true. Things as big as grief or as small as the frustration of getting out the door with a toddler who won’t put their shoes on when it’s raining outside.

Let’s look at the second one. You may be a harried parent whose partner is out of town leaving you to get the kid to daycare on time while answering 3,000 questions about cereal and birds and spoons and how to build a kitchen table and how do clouds make rain and the necessity of those pesky shoes they won’t put on all on your own. That internal turmoil may cause you to snap at your child or slam the door a little too hard behind you or stop by the Starbucks drive-thru between drop-off and work or fire off a snarky text to your partner. There are any number of reactions you may have, but the stimulus remains specific, identifiable, and resonant.

Now, imagine a parent in a psychological thriller. The kid asks all the same questions, refuses to put on the shoes, sends the parent’s emotional boiling point past frustration and into full on eruption. What would they do? Perhaps they make a plan to run away after dropping the kid off? Or murder the partner that got them into this parenting mess in the first place? Or…the possibilities are endless and no matter how “unrelatable” they appear, the reader who also remembers those days of endless questions and tardiness because of toddler temper tantrums will identify in some way with the truth you’ve provided about how hard it is to raise a kid.

Write what you know.

Doesn’t mean you know about murdering spouses. It means you know what could, under the right circumstances, drive someone to do it. (Like the night my youngest learned how to crawl out of the crib for the first time and proceeded to do it every two minutes between 7:30pm and midnight on day 2 of my husband’s 7-day business trip. I opted for the snarky texts, but… )

Focus on the truth of your scene, not the facts of it. Focus on what you know to be true. Focus on what you have to say or share or want so desperately to be understood about yourself.

The more specific YOU are, the more your writing will resonate with a reader.

This kind of vulnerability and level of authenticity can be scary. I hit post on Monday and was fearful of checking Instagram later that day. What if I put all my soft, sensitive bits out into the world and they were scoffed at or criticized? Instead I was rewarded with shared experiences, a community of others who opened up their truths to me, and felt comfort in my loss by sharing my father with others.

Write what YOU know.

Share it with the world.

Be brave.

Your readers will recognize your truth, trust you for sharing it, and come back to your work for more.

Featured image by Nick Fewings on Unsplash