The truism, “write what you know,” probably got its start with the French realists and, if names be named, my guess is that it started with Gustave Flaubert’s almost maniacal approach to creating a scene. One of the copies that I own of Madame Bovary brings with it a facsimile of the manuscript and notes Flaubert himself scratched, including the duration of each leg of the infamous Hirondelle passage.
Rules are made to be broken (albeit at your own risk), so it is no wonder that such a fundamental rule as “write what you know” is also a prime target in the know-it-all atmosphere of some creative writing workshops. (The rule is scorned as simplistic by students and workshop leaders alike, until the day you write about something you do not know and fail miserably. Then the same workshop leader who earlier laughed off such a simpleton rule will look you straight in the eye and recommend that you stick to writing what you know. The world is full of people like that and they are not all in politics.)
James Collins, author of Beginner’s Greek, set part of his novel in southwest France. After the novel was first published in 2008, Collins described the public’s reception –
[…] I received particular compliments on these passages, which made me enormously proud. Why? Because I had never in my life been near [that part of France], and my descriptions of it were entirely made up. To a writer, it may be gratifying to capture reality with uncanny accuracy, but it is even more gratifying to successfully fake it.
Later, Collins accepted an invitation to rent a house in the region that he had described in his novel. That’s when he discovered how much he had gotten wrong in his made-up passages. He had missed the wildflowers, the foie gras, and the warm summer evenings. Collins concluded –
Reality is usually so disappointing! But in this case, the opposite was true.
Some places are like that.
Perhaps the moral of this post is first, write what you know, but if you don’t, if you make it up and you are successful at faking it, don’t tempt fate any further by then verifying how close your invented passages came to the real thing.
Image: Detail of Flaubert’s drawing showing the route that Emma Bovary and her lover took by coach, in Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (Conard ed.1930), at 499; Source: James Collins, “Better Than Fiction,” Departures (Oct. 2009), at 84
