Write what you know....maybe and maybe not

When I was a teenager back in the 1970s, I remember my creative writing teacher always saying that we young writers should write what we know.

For me there were two problems with that instruction:

1.  I didn't really feel I knew anything.  I grew up quite sheltered on a military base where I lived for 17 years (we weren't the ones who got transferred every few years).  I just didn't feel my life experiences were worth writing about and that anything I did know was boring and inconsequential.

2.  The life experiences I did have were ones I didn't wish to expose on paper. Even today I don't generally touch those years with a proverbial 10-foot pole. Those years stay in a vault that does not get opened.

So that left me no choice except to write about the things that interested me.  This included certain time periods, historical figures and somewhat gothic romances.  I only wrote drama, and I remember one classmate having the upstart audacity to admonish that I shouldn't write drama because what did I know about it?  Oh, little did he know.  Please refer again to bullet point #2.  I couldn't write about my personal drama, but I could infuse it into my characters.  I wasn't very good at doing it in my teen years, but I am confident with my abilities in that regard now.  I can not only bring my readers to tears, I can even bring myself to tears.  When I wrote the death of one of my characters from a novel I wrote 10 years ago, I wept for an entire weekend.  I mourned his loss.  When I lost my beloved grandfather in 1973, one of my teachers had said, "Don't cry.  He wouldn't want you to cry."  I was denied the mourning process, but I was able to live it over three decades later through my writing.  Recently I wrote a short story that touched that vaulted door of those childhood years, and I made myself cry.  At least one reader cried too.

These days I continue to write subjects that interest me, and if I don't know something needed for the story, I research it.  That is perhaps were the early writing teacher failed me: that she should have said to write what I want to write about but just make sure it is thoroughly researched.  That is not to say that you vomit back the plethora of data you have gathered but that you know your subject well enough to write it with authority, as if you had lived it, as if you had been there.  At that point your imagination is free to take your characters where they need to go.

Trying to be diligent

I have always been a great lover of books.  In fact, as my high school graduation gift from my parents, I requested books.  My oldest sister got an amethyst pendant necklace, but books were and will always be more valuable to me than jewelry.  I can't remember what any of my other siblings received for their graduation presents, but there's nothing like the tactile glossiness of a pristine dust jacket, followed by the first audible crack of the binding when the front cover is opened.  The smell of the ink on the page, the smell of the paper.

The trouble is, I like having the books, but I don't always get around to reading them.  Nevertheless, they look good on the shelf, something for guests to talk about. Meretricious at best. That was then.  I have almost none of the books I gathered throughout the years.  They become burdensome in weight and shelving requirements, and interests in reading material also changed, and they have all found their way to various charity shops between Colorado and California.  Only a few reside in storage at my sister's house.  I need to have her send them to me.

In my new living situation I have started with basically nothing, but I have been purchasing books again.  I have such a small new library that no shelving is yet needed.  That may not be true for much longer.  I don't want to get into the bad habit of compulsively buying books that I think sound interesting to read but in fact do not get read, so I am trying to limit myself:  when I am half way through a book, I allow myself to buy another. That was the original idea, but that has already gone to the wayside.  I am currently on my second Laurie R. King "Mary Russell" novel, A Monstrous Regiment of Women, and I already have book #3 in hand.  Books 4 and 5 are ordered.  Plus two biographies on Benedict Cumberbatch... plus the complete original Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.  I also have my friend's book on cycling across America, Under a Triumphant Sky, but to be fair I did read a rough draft of it before it was published.  I also have several new reference books on building a smarter word vocabulary although I still painstakingly write down words I come across that I don't know, and I write down their definitions.  Should I choose to use one of them, I highlight it in green so that I know that it appears somewhere in my writing.

Quote from Chapter 3 "I am the one holding the mirror you
do not wish to look into."  Yeah, it's like that.

I am continuing to work on my 4th Blackbird book.  Due to the complexity of the research, I don't anticipate being done with it until later this year.  Although I completed the first chapter fairly quickly, and I do know overall where I am going with this book, chapter 2 has not come easily to me.  I finished a chapter that occurs much later in the book, but then I've never written in a linear fashion.  Then something unexpected happened in chapter 2, something that opened up a can of worms or Pandora's box, if you will, and I wasn't sure I wanted to deal with it.  That serendipity in storytelling happens sometimes.  It was something that I could not rightfully ignore, however, to stay true to the character although it really colored the drama of the story in a very different way,  I could have ignored it.  I could have never brought it up and no one would have been the wiser, but I threw in the monkey wrench, and the most devastating things began to happen...and chapter 2 and 3 began to write themselves.  I was giddy with delight... not so much that the chapters were finally moving but that I had found a vein of inspiration and have been mining it for everything it's worth... and it's worth a lot, but at a great cost to the characters.

My neighbors don't understand why I am smiling so much when we get together for a communal meal, but when I am feeling quite inspired and the words are flowing, there is no better feeling to me.  I wonder if other writers feel that way.

Difficult chapters

I'm currently working on the 4th in my "Blackbird" series of books, and I just finished a very difficult chapter.  It was difficult on many different levels:

1. It is the final game-changer between two characters, and now I am completely AU ("alternate universe") with no turning back.  Part of me is wondering - what the heck have I done??!!!

2.  The research was pretty intense.  Although I was very well-versed in this particular subject 20 years ago, I had to reacquaint myself with some information.

3.  I use real places in my books, specifically venues, hotels, restaurants.  I don't make that stuff up. That means if I am sending my character to a specific restaurant, for example, I go to that restaurant's website, look at their menu, and figure out what my character would order, and that detail is generally included.  If my character stays at a particular Ritz-Carlton, I go to that specific hotel's website, look at the rooms offered and figure out which one my character would stay in.  I don't just make up names for hotels and restaurants.  Why should I?  If my character visits a little town, I use Google maps to get me onto the street level of that town so that i can see what's there (or not there in some cases).  I look at street names, and sometimes I choose a particular street simply because I like its name, but regardless, the location is always correct for the action required.  If my character visits a museum, I know the layout of the interior.  I study pictures of the museum and its exhibits, what street it is located on, and what is nearby.

4. My characters got to do something I have a dream to do, so I got to live vicariously through them - which meant that my research had to be spot-on.

As I don't write in sequence, however, this chapter has to wait for its proper slot within the book. There is a lot that happens before and a lot afterwards.  Of course, I am still tinkering slightly with the chapter but I am also moving on.

Vocabulary Shortcomings

As a writier I've always thought I had a fairly well-rounded vocabulary.  Certainly there are many words I don't know, but SHERLOCK has forced me to be a bit of a wordsmith lately as I hunt down the meanings of words like meretricious, fatuous, alienist, recalcitrant, intransigent and many others.

Recently I purchased the book, The Beekeeper's Apprentice by Laurie R. King, and although I enjoyed the book, I didn't enjoy the fact that my vocabulary took a bit of beating.  I have suddenly become so hyper-sensitive to words I don't know that when I come across one, I will stop immediately to look up its definition and write it down.  King's book produced several pages of my handwritten definitions. Perhaps these words are common to some people, but they weren't to me.  I grew a bit despondent over my alarming inability to immediately know these words that were popping off the page like a proverbial sore thumb.

I began to think my vocabulary was in serious trouble and so I set out to correct the issue by ordering four books that were supposed to improve me.  They are:

The Words You Should Know by David Olsen - 1200 essential words every educated person should be able to use and define.

More Words you Should Know by Michelle Bevilacqua - 1500 more words every educated person should be able to use and define

Word Smart (The Princeton Review) by Adam Robinson and the staff of the Princeton Review - Building an Educated Vocabulary

Pocket Posh Word Power:120 Words To Make You Sound Intelligent - by Wordnik.

Of these four, the first two were far too basic for me, but I do recommend that all parents should start their kids on them no later than the first year of middle school, and that these words should be known by the time they leave middle school.  The third book, Word Smart, should be started in high school.  All three books are geared towards college/university entrance exams, SATs and GREs.

The last book purely is erudite fluff, full of words you will never need but which can pepper a conversation with the best ivy league clerisy or the hoity-toity art crowd.  Even then, you likely will not have heard of 90% of them nor ever have a real need to use any of them.

I am working my way through digesting Pocket Posh, but it will take some time to assimilate those words into my written vocabulary.  I have already assimilated one, however, and solved a word mystery from the most recent Sherlock episode, "The Abominable Bride."  I had no idea what the line "Viennese alienist" meant, but I do now.  It was a reference to Sigmund Freud.  It is words like that which can make me feel like a complete moron.

I will soon be ordering the book, 500 Foreign Words and Phrases You Should Know to Sound Smart: Terms to Demonstrate Your Savoir Faire, Chutzpah, and Bravado by Linda Archer and Peter Archer.  I am remarkably lacking in that area.

I will also soon start reading the The Monstrous Regiment of Women by Laurie R. King, which is a sequel to the aforementioned book, and hopefully I will be writing down fewer words this time, but she may surprise me. Perhaps my vocabulary beating will be a little less severe the second time around, however.

King, by the way, has a Twitter account for her character, Mary Russell.  It is @mary_russell, and she will answer you as the character.  Mary Russell becomes the young apprentice to the retired Sherlock Holmes during WWI in the The Beekeeper's Apprentice, and in subsequent books marries and builds a life with him as his partner in solving mysteries.