Unfortunately for him (and fortunately for me) he was discovered and unmasked and the repercussions began to play themselves out. Now, I don’t know the people involved in that incident and I don’t want to know them. All I want, from that story or any other, is to hear a single resonant bar of truth or mystery or what-if-ness so I can hum it back and play a riff on it.Key line: I don’t want to know them.
October 5, 2013
"The professorial dictum has always been to write what you know, but I say write what you don’t know and find something out."
Says T.C. Boyle, with this specific example of his approach to story writing. He'd heard of about an incident in which a man and his wife came home drunk after a party, and the man "crept back out, dressed all in black and donning a black ski mask... climb[ed] up the side of a cabin belonging to a single woman and peep[ed] through the second-story window."
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An argument I've never forgotten from Ursula LeGuin, when told to "write what you know" when she wrote in imaginary worlds, ran more or less, "But these are my own imaginary countries. Who knows them better than I do?"
Maybe he felt the peeping tom was simpatico. Nearly all fiction writing seems to me exhibitionism or voyeurism.
Which is odd, since quite a lot read fiction to escape the oppression of privacy -- out of loneliness, or at least surfeit of themselves and those they know IRL as the kids say. So the mechanism connnects those who share too much with those who share too little, to mutual benefit. The wonders of the invisible hand.
He wants to know the people he makes up in his mind, not the actual people.
Happens all the time in real life. Think bad marriages. Or bad presidents.
"Write what you know" is a mistake for teaching undergrads how to write, unless all you want to read are short stories about drinking, getting high and/or getting laid in uninspiring surroundings. Let 'em write science fiction if they want to. Can't be worse than what the average SyFy network screenwriter comes up with.
"I don't want to know them."
The MSM view of anyone not progressive.
I heard Paul Johnson interviewed one time. He was asked about his book A History of the Jews, since he is Catholic and has written a similar book about the Catholic Church. He replied, "If you want to learn something, write a book about it."
I feel the same about the desire to learn something by reading about it.
somefeller said...
"Write what you know" is a mistake for teaching undergrads how to write, unless all you want to read are short stories about drinking, getting high and/or getting laid in uninspiring surroundings. Let 'em write science fiction if they want to. Can't be worse than what the average SyFy network screenwriter comes up with.
10/5/13, 3:37 PM
Dude those SyFy network screenwriters are geniuses. Perverse geniuses but geniuses all the same. Think about it; how many people are smart enough to come up with the brilliant schlock they come up? Can an ordinary person dream up Sharknado? I wonder what drugs these guys take? Better still, I don't think I want to know.
From experience, an unknown topic is often injected by the fiction writer for the simple reasons: I want to learn about this and inform my readers as well. This happens more than you think. Tom Clancy...King...
A student of mine gave a speech on false memory syndrome and years later that concept sparked me and was woven into the story line of a novel.
From the word "repercussions" I pictured a a story in which this one incident led a swift Thomas-Hardy-like deterioration in the man's whole situation till finally he left town broke and wifeless in an old car he kept in his driveway to fix up but never did. But that was too gloomy. Then I pictured a town where others tried the same stunt - night after night dark figures darted about, scaling fences, climbing porches - and more and more did it - and then some chose to enter the lives they saw within and leave their own - like lives seen from a train, a passing moment, but you do stop and go in and the moment becomes years. And why? Because they did want to know them. The End.
I find TC Boyle incredibly tedious - but that is just me.
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