The Bittersweet Pill of “Write What You Know”…

“Write what you know!” Every book ever written on writing will say this to the poor blithering idiot who aspires to become a writer. What they fail to mention is how darn hard it is to write about anything…let alone “what you know.”

Why?

Because “what you know” is what you have experienced, meaning it comes wrapped in the bittersweet vine of emotions. And anyone living in New England, America, knows that bittersweet is a strangulation vine that kills the tree it decides to bestow its attention upon.

What do I mean by that in this context?

I mean when you sit down to “write what you know,” suddenly you discover how your emotions are strangling you as you try to barf out that experience on the blank page in front of you. And this, by the way, goes for even the greatest, most wonderful and tenderest experiences you have had. We won’t even touch upon the nasty shameful and idiotic ones.

So here I was in the summer of 2006: a forty-four years old empty nester. A single mother of two who had done right by her kids. Brutally forced to face that on the way there, from having a first kid at twenty-two until turning forty-four, my kids had done phenomenally well…but what had I done for myself? Who was I, other than this middle-aged frau with no identity…always engaged in doing humdrum, no-satisfaction jobs to pay the bills? No laurels. No recognition. No nothing. Just a withering stranger in the mirror, with whom I couldn’t even identify anymore, because in my mind I was still stuck on seventeen, when my whole life had careened out of control and I had desperately started back peddling to save whatever I could.

“Write your own story, Mama,” said my older child, a lofty NYU junior in the Tisch School of the Arts. “You have such a riveting life story. Why don’t you write a book about it?”

Such a typical, careless remark tossed off the cuff by a callow youngster…yet, drowning as I was, I clutched that straw. It gave me a glimmer of what I could do…without endangering my miserable jobs. Without rocking “the boat.”

 Therefore, untrained and uninstructed, I dove into writing. Hey the one thing I did do throughout my life was read. I didn’t read for fashion. I didn’t read because I was smart. I didn’t even do it to impress anybody. I read because during my impoverished Indian childhood, books replaced the television and radio my grandma (sole caretaker) couldn’t afford. Books represented an instant and free escape from my reality. So reading was my drug.

Hey, how hard could it be to write a book? I wrote English well and I certainly knew my story, right?

I wrote and wrote, thinking how astonishingly easy it was. Of course, my book would be a bestseller. What else could it be after the life I had lived?

My innocent dream took its first knock on the chin when an agent from India wrote back in January, 2010: this author could become a fairly decent writer if she learned how to write!

 From bestseller status in my head to the above was quite a plunge. Disappointed, disheartened, and adequately chastened, I took to my bed in tears for twelve days. Every morning I got up, went to work, somehow dragged home, and cried through the evenings. All I was, was a failure. Second to last in the line of a formidable legacy of overachieving ancestors, I was one big fat failure…destined to die an anonymous death in a foreign country: unremembered, unacknowledged, and unsung.

On day thirteen, I woke up to a new determination: I would either become a passable writer…or I would die trying. At the time, poverty being a very real consideration, I went to my local used book store and cleaned out their “writing shelf.” Armed with twenty-one books on how-to-write, I began reading my first book by Eudora Welty.

By the ninth book, when even the examples were repeating themselves…I picked up the pen again…this time more timid, more tentative. Humiliatingly aware of how much I didn’t know about creative writing. Why had I assumed writing was simple just because I “knew English?” Writing was an art form, like playing the piano to become a concert pianist was an art form. Like becoming a good plumber required years of instruction and practice. Like training to be a doctor took ten solid years.

But Christ! I was approaching fifty. So, when would I become a passable writer? At sixty? Hey, replied my brain—Frank McCourt finally wrote his life story at sixty-six. If I gave up on this dream now because I was too old, what would I tell myself at seventy? Then I’d be a seventy-year-old failure instead of an “approaching fifty” one.

 This time I wrote without any inflated intentions or expectations. Humble and contrite, I simply wrote to try and convey the color, the texture, and the heart of an incident from my rocky childhood. I wrote to give my children a taste of what I had experienced. But, hardheaded as I was, I had spent an entire lifetime suppressing my emotions to get to the next day. I still didn’t understand that I had to “feel” anything, let alone make my readers feel it. I just focused on writing the next colorful incident.

That was, until I decided to write about my stepfather molesting me at age six. It gave me my first inkling of what writing was really about.

Now six to fifty-ish is a long time. In my psyche, I had laid that incident to rest a hundred years ago. Plus, given my special life, I had further undergone countless worse experiences, so the molestation memory was a very small potato in my bank.

Yeah. Until I decided to write about it.

That’s when that bittersweet strangulation vine reared its fatal head to choke me with so many unrequested emotions, I found myself drowning in a sea of pain, rage, helplessness, tears, feeling like a fool because I was crying over something that had happened so long ago. Something I couldn’t even change.

The exercise was so horrible, I couldn’t write more than a paragraph a day.

But thankfully…I wasn’t writing a book anymore. Nor was there any sweet publishing deal banging my door down with a deadline. Maybe if I forced myself through this exercise, it would help me process an incident I clearly hadn’t forgotten or overcome? I swear I didn’t know which was worse: sitting and reviewing the failure of my life, or writing about being molested at age six.

 I only had one thing straight: if it was this hard to write about an incident where I had been an innocent victim…I was a long, long way from writing a book, and furthermore, I didn’t even know I wanted to write a book anymore, since I felt too ashamed to confess to or admit to those situations in which I had been an older participant.

Why?

Because sure, I “knew” my life story, but hell, did I want others to know it?! The dirty parts, the shameful parts, the stupid parts, the shocking parts?

 So that’s where my writing journey began: facing how much of what I “knew” I was willing to share.

Oh! But that was #1 of a hundred deterrents. :)) Welcome to the thrilling world of writing. Lol.

At last I had a little more empathy towards all those enthusiastic writers who started so strong…yet wilted like daisies by the wayside, miles and miles before the finish line.

 Wake up call: writing was one tough thing to do. Writing well was even tougher. And writing a great book was like scaling Mt. Everest.

Was it a challenge I wanted to undertake?

It was so much easier to just sit and mope over being a failure.

 Do you have any similar hurdle you are avoiding?