10: Write What You Know

The end is near; and I don't mean the running. I mean the blog.

After tonight I'll have just 9 more entries to write. I feel like I have a million topics I still want to putter around on. How did the time go so quickly?

I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that for every blog entry I've posted, I've written two. Some days more. Sometimes it's hard to commit to one topic. Others I pick a topic that's so big it could go on forever, and I have to shut it down and switch back to something simple, like bananas... or socks. If I'm writing about socks, you can be sure that's just a front for something much longer and deeper that I couldn't put a bow on before bedtime.

There are a few things I want to say about what it's been like to have written a blog every single day for a year. First and foremost, the discipline of doing anything for a year, whether you want to or not, without a break, has taught me how (mechanically) to cast off fear. Just do whatever you're anxious about over and over again. Eventually, you'll forget why you were afraid, and you'll just start showing up for business, ready to play. You can't work on your skills until that fear is pushed to the side.

Next, I've had a bit of a coming of age with this blog, creatively. I've finally stopped making shit up and trying to sound important when I write. Finally, finally, finally I'm writing what I know! Every arts professor I've ever had has tried to drum this message into me. I didn't listen because I felt I didn't know anything. If I wrote what I knew it would have been a page with the sentence, "I have nothing to say," over and over on it. Quite literally.

So, instead of writing what I knew, I wrote what I thought sounded deep and literary. I made sure the words were beautifully organized, as a foil for the hollowness inside. In the studio arts, I focused on the quality of the components, their originality, the lines... I picked a meaningful theme with known emotions I could attach to. Not my emotions! Just some obvious universal emotions.

In writing I've always picked topics I found interesting but had no experience with. Protagonists dying of cancer, one with dissociative personality disorder, the woman painted in Degas' "Woman with Chrysanthemums," a few TV pilots with nobody remotely like me in the ensemble.

In the studio arts, I didn't just create around themes I didn't understand, I liked to employ shock value. For my sculpture class, I welded like a mad woman, poured aluminum, and hung mobiles from campus trees. It was fun. As my final project I picked a theme I thought I could project myself into - a woman's conflict between working and staying home to care for her children. I appropriated objects. There was a full size oven that I'd found at a junk yard and filled (literally filled) with cookies. On the range (which was lit) there was a seamstress' bust with a headless plastic baby stuck on top. Horrifying! I got an A+. Honestly, I should have gotten an F. What was I talking about? This was not my dilemma yet... It's still not my dilemma, even. That wasn't a topic for me to have tackled at 21.

My superficiality came to a head in college in my photography class. I finally had a professor who really called me out in an arresting way. I was a fine photographer by then; I'd started in high school, in the dark room, the whole thing. I was paid to do portraits. I shot a few Bat Mitzvahs. So, by college, I had to really deliver on content. For my final project senior year, like with sculpture, I was into being shocking. I created a series I called "Back Alley Abortion." Get ready. This is bad! I bought dead fish from the grocery store, butchered them with scalpels, lay the bloody mess on the white snow in the parking lot behind my apartment building, with a brick wall in the background, and then photographed the whole thing in black and white. It was so beautiful to look at! Haunting. The composition was perfect! I did my presentation Cooper Union style, with everyone in the class there for the critique; and I got reamed. What the fuck was I talking about! The teacher seemed very mad... Why hadn't I picked a subject I knew anything about? I remember how scared the other kids in my class looked for me when I was receiving my critique. They knew I was good. Was the teacher being unfair?

The teacher wasn't being unfair. She was expecting more of me. She wanted me to use my voice. I could be artful and clever, even shocking. But all my stories were flat because ultimately, I STILL HAD NOTHING TO SAY. Or, I thought, what I really had to say would be completely uninteresting to other people.

In writing for a year now about uninteresting things like running, and about what's happened to me because of running, I've finally tapped into what it means to write what you know. It surprises me daily that I haven't created imaginary characters to bulk up my story, or done anything to enhance the reader's experience, and I'm still writing. This exercise has been all about being genuine, and practicing sharing that in words.

There is a great responsibility in offering up wordsmithery for public viewing. You can't just say shit because the phrases sound nice together. You have to say things that are true in some way around a particular theme that you are qualified to speak about. Not to say you can't make up radical characters that are nothing like you; but they need to be characters you can see and feel yourself in; they must be genuinely you as you write. Writing fiction isn't about telling how it was, it's about becoming your subjects and bleeding their blood onto the keyboard.

That's the discipline of the writer. That's what defines you as a writer, if you are one - that you think about being genuine, and make a conscious effort to literally be your characters if you're writing fiction, so that you are always writing what you know. And you need to keep seeking out more to know... so that you have the license to keep writing new things. That is what makes being a writer so fun! The curious mindset and life of exploring that goes with it. Definitely not the carpal tunnel.