In an earlier blog entry, I wrote about my freshman year at college, and how that was the inspiration for Matrimony, though I said I changed many of the details. But which details, and why? What's the role of autobiography in fiction?
How do you balance lived experience with imagination in order to come up with art? I teach writing to undergraduate and MFA students, and that's one of the questions that I get asked most often. Should you be writing about yourself? How personal should it be? There's of course no easy formula (if only there were!), but I think there are ways to think about the question that can be helpful to people starting to write. Among the students I've taught, I've seen a whole lot of talent, but also at times a real underconfidence (What writer isn't insecure? Believe me, that feeling never ends, even if you encounter some success), this feeling that you're young and what do you have that's important to write about, that could interest anyone but you and your friends. There's a grain of truth there, in that I think it takes time even for a really talented writer to mature. You don't see eight-year-old writing prodigies the way you see eight-year-old violin prodigies or eight-year-old ballerinas and figure skaters. It's a different learning curve, and some people think that as long as you're under fifty you're still considered a young writer. At the same time, I like to remind my students of what Flannery O'Connor said--that anyone who has lived until the age of ten has enough material to write about for a lifetime.
The question, though, is how to turn that material into art? Do you write what you know or what you don't know? That's always the question a writer faces, and it's the question my students ask me. And what I like to say is that you should write what you know about what you don't know or what you don't know about what you know. I know--that sounds like some nightmare GRE problem. But conceptually, it's not as complicated as it sounds. Writing what you know about what you don't know is taking a situation that's unfamiliar to you and imagining yourself in it, and writing what you don't know about what you know is taking a situation that's familiar to you and imagining someone different from you experiencing it. The idea is to have the benefit of both closeness and distance. You want what you're writing about to be close enough to your own experience that there's heart in it but not so close that you aren't able to realize the ways you can use imagination to get at a deeper, more authentic truth. It's this balance between closeness and distance that's essential to me as a writer and that I try to convey to my students.
