Write What You Know
I had a professor for a writing class in college who used to always tell us to “write what you know.” But then he would amend that by saying no one wanted to read about writers, so, we should write about what we know outside of our writing lives.
It took me about 25 years to understand I both agreed and disagreed with this advice. One, I did want to write what I know. But two, I realized I actually love reading books about writers! Why couldn’t I write one myself?
I have been a writer, well, as far back as I can remember. First, I wrote lists of all the many, many books I read so I could keep track. Then, in my tween and teen years, I kept a journal filled with (very bad) original poems. In high school and college, I wrote short stories, and I’ve been writing novels for most of my adult life, making a living as a novelist for the last 15 years.
But my latest novel, my 12th, The Fiction Writer, marks the first time I’ve written a novel about a novelist. It’s what I know, and yet, it’s fiction, so it’s absolutely nothing like what I know at all.
My main character in The Fiction Writer, Olivia, is a struggling novelist. Her first novel was published to modest success, but her second, a retelling of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, sold barely any copies. And ever since, she has struggled to sell another novel. Then, her agent sends her an offer that sounds almost too good to be true: Gorgeous and reclusive mega-billionaire Henry “Ash” Asherwood wants to hire Olivia to ghostwrite his grandmother’s story about her connection to Daphne du Maurier. All she has to do to take the job is fly out to Malibu to meet him and see if they’re a good fit. But once she gets there, nothing is what it seems, Ash seems more interested in her than in getting to work on his project, and Olivia finds herself caught up in a modern-day gothic mystery of her own.
Though Olivia and I are both fiction writers, Olivia is very much not me. For one thing, I have never been flown to Malibu to ghostwrite a sexy billionaire’s novel. Writing for me usually involves coffee, sweatpants, my messy desk, and a whole lot of quiet time to think. Olivia is also a little bit of a mess, floundering in both her career and her personal life, while my personal life is wonderfully boring and uncomplicated.
But I did give Olivia some qualities that were inspired by my own life as a writer, and I did have a lot of fun writing about the aspects of writing I do know.
Check out Jillian Cantor’s The Fiction Writer here:
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For one thing, Olivia talks about having “writer brain” in the novel—the ability, as a writer, to always imagine stories that aren’t there. In her case, she starts to question how much about Ash and the creepy vibes surrounding his dead wife are actually, well, creepy and how much is her writer brain making up stories that aren’t there. (Because she’s in a novel, it turns out much of the creepiness is not imagined at all!) But in my real life, I do have a tendency to find fictional stories in the most mundane things, wherever I seem to go. My family has, more than once, asked me to stop talking about a fictional murder I’m sure must’ve happened. The term writer brain gets thrown around a lot in my house.
I also gave Olivia her share of publishing ups and downs, all of which I have experienced myself in some form over the last 15 years: Editors leaving, imprints folding, bad reviews, disappointing sales numbers, and then on the flipside, a book that suddenly sells well over a long period time and surprise royalty checks, too.
Olivia feels the quiet desperation about writing I sometimes feel myself. She has the drive, the need, to keep writing something better. To keep selling books and doing what she loves each day, even when it sometimes feels like a Sisyphean task with all the publishing odds stacked against her. “My writing was the most important thing, the only thing,” Olivia thinks in the book, more than once. And many times, I have felt something similar myself over the last 15 years, felt that the only thing keeping me going in my writing career was my own similar drive and persistence and need to keep writing novels.
(Jillian Cantor: On Reimagining a Classic.)
And finally, like me, Olivia is fascinated with retellings, considering the way a new point of view can change a story she has always known and loved. I wrote The Fiction Writer immediately after writing Beautiful Little Fools, a retelling of The Great Gatsby from the women’s point of view. When we meet Olivia in The Fiction Writer, she has most recently published a retelling of Rebecca from Rebecca’s point of view.
There was something very fun, and a little meta, about writing about a writer who just wrote a retelling, as a writer myself…who just wrote a retelling. But being able to add all the little writing kernels I know into The Fiction Writer is what made it one of my most enjoyable fiction writing experiences to date.