by Jessie Seigel, AIW Board Member
As a writer, I find myself perpetually at odds with the adage: write what you know. Too often it is taken literally, as an injunction to approach only subject matter that comes from one’s own experience. Frequently, this results in fiction that is simply veiled autobiography. Unless the life is extremely colorful, and/or the writer is extremely insightful, such fiction is, more often than not, narrow, self-absorbed, and emotionally shallow, rarely creating or even attempting to create that vital connection between the mundane and the universal.
Thus, we get stories about “how my boyfriend left me” or “my wife cheated” or “my uncle was a drunk” which lack the depth to express something broader about the nature of love or the nature of the relationship between men and women, or anything new or substantial about our common humanity. Or we get stories by college professors about college professors who want to write stories. Solipsism. Some are quite adequately written, but they are “safe” and, ultimately, unmemorable.
I propose to turn the injunctive phrase around. Don’t write what you know. Know what you write. That is, learn about the world, engage the world. And then, in writing, make the empathetic leap. Step into the body of the other, of someone different from yourself. Live and write in their shoes. Be them in your head until you have put them on the page.
Perhaps not everyone has the same natural degree of empathy or of ability to make the leap successfully. But, to me, the interesting writers are those that write beyond their personal experience, who attempt that empathetic leap to other experiences, even to other peoples, other cultures. And I am convinced that a deeper understanding of our common humanity, and a consequent deepening of the writing, will be gained by the attempt.
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Jessie Seigel is an AIW board member. Her fiction has appeared in such publications as Ontario Review, Gargoyle,Elan, and the anthology Electric Grace. Her poetry has been featured bi-weekly in the Boston Jewish Times. She is an associate editor at The Potomac Review.
