‘Write What You Know’ — Helpful Advice or Idle Cliché?

Each week in Bookends, two writers take on questions about the world of books. This week, Zoë Heller and Mohsin Hamid discuss whether writers should stick to what they know.

By Zoë Heller

You should write what you really know — as opposed to a slick, bowdlerized version of what you know.

I was in grade school when I first encountered the adage about writing what you know. It concluded my teacher’s tactful comments on a story I had written about an 18th-century highwayman. Stung by her tepid response, I rejected the advice out of hand. How ludicrous, I thought. How limiting! What about science fiction? What about fantasy? What about any writing that travels beyond the borders of the author’s sex or race or age?

Several decades on, the agony of my teacher’s criticism has somewhat abated, and I can see a little more of what she was driving at.

The first mistake I made as a schoolgirl was to assume I was being asked to write exclusively about things that had happened to me. In fact, the injunction is only to know; the business of how you come by your knowledge is left quite open. You can mine your own life, yes. But you can also sympathetically observe other people’s experiences. You can read and research. And you can use your imagination. What good writers know about their subjects is usually drawn from some combination of these sources. The problem with my highwayman story, it seems safe to say, was that I had drawn on none of them. It didn’t necessarily matter that I had never robbed a stagecoach. But it did matter that I had not troubled myself to find out, or even partially imagine, anything about what robbing a stagecoach might entail.

The other, subtler error I made — and continued to make for a long time afterward — was to suppose that translating experiential knowledge into fiction was a simple, straightforward, even banal business. For most writers, it actually takes a lot of hard work and many false starts before they are in a position to extract what is most valuable and interesting from their autobiographies.

In “The Enigma of Arrival,” V. S. Naipaul describes the momentous journey he made shortly before his 18th birthday, from Trinidad to England. The long voyage — Port of Spain to Puerto Rico to New York by air; New York to Southampton by ship — seemed to present rich material for his writing, and he eagerly wrote down his observations in a special writer’s diary. But years later when he came to examine this document, he saw that he had excised all the most interesting elements of what he had seen and felt, deeming them insufficiently literary — out of keeping with the “elegant, knowing, unsurprised” writer’s personality he wished to assume. The family farewell at the airport in Port of Spain; the cousin who took him aside to tell him confidentially that he should sit at the back of the plane because it was safer there; the squabble on board the ship, when a black man was assigned to his cabin and complained that they were being lumped together because they were both “colored” — all of these scenes were absent, as was any acknowledgment of his loneliness, his panic, the “rawness” of his nerves. What he had recorded instead were those incidents and bits of dialogue that seemed to confirm an idea of the grown-up world he had gathered from books and films. “So that, though traveling to write, concentrating on my experience, eager for experience, I was shutting myself off from it, editing it out of my memory.”

Most writers have, for reasons of diffidence, or snobbery, or fear of exposure, done the same thing at some point in their writing lives — unconsciously censored themselves and thrown out the wheat, mistaking it for nonliterary chaff. In this sense, the reminder to write what you know — what you really know, as opposed to a slick, bowdlerized version of what you know — continues to be pertinent advice, not just for 11-year-old schoolgirls, but for writers of any age.

Zoë Heller is the author of three novels: “Everything You Know”; “Notes on a Scandal,” which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and adapted for film; and “The Believers.” She has written feature articles and criticism for a wide range of publications, including The New Yorker, The New Republic and The New York Review of Books.

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By Mohsin Hamid

I’ve written from the point of view of a woman, of a global surveillance system, of a writer who is being beheaded.

Writers, especially younger writers, often hear the exhortation “Write what you know.” This is understandable. Some of the best fiction ever written seems to have followed that advice.

Take Kenzaburo Oe’s novel “A Personal Matter.” Published in 1964, it recounts the tale of a man whose son is born with what appears to be a brain hernia; our hero’s life crumbles; he considers killing his child. In 1963, Oe’s own son was born with brain damage. So Oe does indeed seem to have written what he knew — to devastating effect. I first read the novel almost 20 years ago, and I’ve been unable to forget it. Its honesty and humanity are staggering. It has affected my own experience of being a father, demythologizing fatherhood while making the ordinary more precious.

Olaf Stapledon’s “Star Maker,” on the other hand, seems surely to be a case of writing what you don’t know. There is no record of Stapledon leaving the earth, traveling through space as a disembodied consciousness, encountering and melding with other life-forms and civilizations and eventually with the stars and with the universe itself. Yet that is precisely what our protagonist does in this 1937 novel, among the greatest pieces of science fiction ever written. Stapledon reaches for, and seems to touch, something that is, for lack of a better word, divine. His is a spectacular imaginative and empathetic achievement.

It may be that the DNA of fiction is, like our own DNA, a double helix, a two-stranded beast. One strand is born of what writers have experienced. The other is born of what writers wish to experience, of the impulse towritein order to know.

Fiction comes into existence when these two strands are knitted together. “A Personal Matter” differs in key elements from Oe’s own life: in its ending, for example, when we learn something about the baby’s condition that shifts our sense of what we have previously read. And “Star Maker,” an epic about the possibility for finding union at the edge of universal conflict, cannot but have sprung from Stapledon’s own experience of being in Europe after the First World War and on the eve of the Second.

In my own writing, I am aware of combining both strands. When asked, I usually say I don’t do much research for my fiction, I just live my life. (Which led to someone at a lecture I gave in Karachi last year inquiring, “How did you write all those drug scenes in ‘Moth Smoke,’ then?” My response: “Umm. . . . “)

But I also write about things I haven’t experienced. I’ve written from the point of view of a woman, of a global surveillance system, of a writer who is being beheaded. I write these things because I want to transcend my experiences. I want to go beyond myself. Writing isn’t just my mirror, it’s my astral projection device. I suspect it’s like that for most of us.

In the end, what we know isn’t a static commodity. It changes from being written about. Storytelling alters the storyteller. And a story is altered by being told.

A human self is made up of stories. These stories are rooted partly in experience, and partly in fantasy. The power of fiction lies in its capacity to gaze upon this odd circumstance of our existence, to allow us to play with the conundrum that we are making ourselves up as we go along.

Our bodies are complex biological machines. As long as they live, they create a story about themselves in order to function. We call this story the self. We believe in the reality of the story. We believe the story controls the machine. Yet we are constantly reminded that things are not so simple. We do things not in keeping with our stories, sometimes horrible things. And when we do, we say, “I wasn’t myself.”

Writing is a chance for the stories that are us to come to terms with their innate fiction. So write what you know. But also know you are being written.

Mohsin Hamid is the author of three novels: “Moth Smoke,” a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award; “The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” a New York Times best seller that was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and adapted for film; and, most recently, “How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia.”