Write What You Know!

 

Alice C. Linsley

Most fiction writers tell stories that reflect their life experiences. They tap into what they know is real. That can be said even for the authors of science fiction. Though they have permission to create what is not real, they too draw on personal experiences, felt needs, and emotions. Some element of common human experience must be there for the story to gain readers. The reader is able to enjoy the story to the degree that the contexts are conceivable and relatable.

The legal complexities of John Grisham novels reflect his years of experience as an attorney. After hearing the harrowing testimony of a twelve-year-old rape victim, Grisham started a novel exploring what would happen if the girl’s father had murdered her assailants. Grisham spent three years on A Time to Kill and finished it in 1987. The novel was rejected by many publishers, but eventually bought by Wynwood Press, which published it in June 1988.

By then, Grisham had already begun his next book, the story of a hotshot young attorney lured to what seemed a perfect law firm. He sold the film rights to The Firm to Paramount Pictures for $600,000. The Firm became the bestselling novel of 1991.

With few exceptions, John Updike's novels and stories express his familiarity with Protestant, small-town, middle-class American life with an overlay of sophistication. He wrote for The New Yorker for years, and was immensely successful in his long writing career. Yet success brought trouble at times and strained his relationships. He divorced his wife Mary in 1976.  

Shortly after his marriage to Mary, stories about the Maples began to appear in The New Yorker. They portrayed an attractive couple in their mid20's, their four children, a move from New York to a town north of Boston, the couple's quarrels and reconciliation and eventual no-fault divorce in Massachusetts.

Updike admitted, “All the Maple stories were fairly close to the bone.” While discussing an episode in one of them, he recalled, “I had a fever” — and then corrected himself: “I mean, the hero had a fever.”

His Rabbit, Run concerns a former star athlete who is unable to recapture success when bound by marriage and small-town life and flees responsibility. This was followed by three novels, Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981), and Rabbit at Rest in which Updike sets forth the later periods of Rabbit's life. Rabbit Remembered (2001) returns to characters from those books after Rabbit’s death.

Fannie Hurst's novels portray her experiences in New York City during the "roaring Twenties" and express her frustration as an ambitious woman who wanted to shake things up. Her most famous novel Back Street told the story of a woman who dedicated her life to a married man she passionately loved, only to lose him to his family in the end. While she was married, Hurst had an affair with Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson during the 1920s and 1930s.

Fannie Hurst enjoyed a long heyday during the years between World Wars I and II. Her works were turned into films thirty-one times in forty years. By 1928, she was earning an extraordinary $4000 per story. 

Her novel Lonely Parade portrayed three successful career women who she intended should be happy, but happiness eluded them.

Hurst’s books are largely ignored today, though they were prescribed reading in some colleges through the 1980s. In the end, her flashy, unconventional lifestyle is not one to which most readers can relate. That danger always exists for the fiction writer.

Good fiction requires tapping into real life experiences. Grapple with the reality that is your own. Write what you know!