1.1 Using life experiences in your fiction
Creative writing courses and manuals often offer the advice ‘write what you know’. This is undoubtedly good advice, yet what exactly does it mean? Many writers testify to using their life experiences – their memories and their everyday perceptions – as a source for their fiction or poetry, as well as for their autobiographies and memoirs. Yet these experiences aren't necessarily extraordinary in themselves. You don't have to have led an unusual or exotic life in order to write. You do, however, need to raise your level of perception above the ordinary. Writing what you know means being aware of your own world, both past and present, in as full a way as possible.
This course will introduce and briefly elaborate on some of the ways in which you might ‘know’ the world around you. By looking at the commonplace details of your life in a different way, using your sensory perceptions and learning to use your own memories, you will be exercising certain writing muscles, ones that need regular flexing. In this way you may discover you know more than you thought.
Activity 1
Write down a quick sentence in response to the advice ‘write what you know’. What does it immediately suggest to you?
“Write what you know” refers to writing that is informed and shaped by an author’s own experiences and observations, which can serve as a starting point for finding a way into the world an author is creating.
Activity 2
The purpose of this activity is to provide you with an example of how a known writer has exploited his everyday knowledge and memories in his work. Clicking on the link below will allow you to listen to an extract of an interview with Andrew Cowan, a writer and senior lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. Below is some background information you may find of interest.
Artifact 01 > Author Andrew Cowan.
Pig was Andrew Cowan’s first novel, and it won numerous awards, including the Betty Trask Award and the Sunday Times ‘Young Writer of the Year Award’. Published in 1994, its meticulous realism received great critical acclaim. The novel has obvious connections to Cowan’s own background – it has a Scottish grandfather and is set in a new town in decline very similar to Corby, Cowan’s hometown. He has subsequently published two other novels and at the time of the interview his fourth novel, What I Know, was about to be published. The novels discussed in the interview are Pig(1994), Common Ground (1996) and Crustaceans (2000).
Pig: When his grandmother dies and his grandfather goes into a home, teenager Danny is determined to look after their elderly pig. He and his girlfriend, Surinder secretly meet at the grandparents’ house, enjoying a fragile summer idyll, a refuge from the racist neighbours and family members, brief respite from the blighted new town in which they live.
Common Ground: Ashley, a disillusioned geography teacher, chronicles the birth of his daughter, Maggie, in letters to his globe-trotting brother, Douglas. Painting an intimate picture of his relationship with his partner, Jay, the novel offers a bleak picture of inner city life, and the couple’s growing need for some sort of political involvement. It comes in the form of the road-protest movement: the novel also charts the controversial birth of a road and the campaign to save the nearby Hogslea Common.
Crustaceans: Set on one day – 22nd December, which would have been his dead son Euan’s sixth birthday – Paul drives to the coast, as thick snow lies on the ground. Talking to the imaginary Euan in the back of the car, he tells him the story of his birth, of his first words, and of Paul’s relationship with Ruth, Euan’s mother. He also tells the story of his own parents, including the unexplained death of his mother when he was a child.
Some questions to think about while you listen:
How did the idea for Cowan’s second novel, Common Ground, come about?
The idea for Cowan’s second novel, Common Ground, came about through the regular writing of journals, handwritten long letters to his friends, and the clipping of stories Cowan thought could make a good starting point or addition for a novel. One set of stories stood out for Cowan - the story of new age travellers and there protests of the building of roads through environmentally sensitive woodlands, which became a part of Common Ground.
What parts of Pig were imagined, what parts researched and what parts autobiographical?
Cowan describes how the beginning, middle, and end of his book Pig were there for him from the beginning as a glimmer of an overall vision. To this end, Cowan explains how: “Every writer writes to figure out what it is they are trying to say, and every book is a kind of journey or exploration where you are looking for the words that will give form to the glimmer.” Cowan notes that although he had the story idea, finding the words to fill out the story was difficult and it ended up being a process he would come to and then leave over the course of several years.
As Cowan has written more, he does more research. The pig itself was an imaginative creation based on research that Cowan did checking out a book from the library about how pigs acted, behaved, looked, and even reproduced. From this he made notes. At one point, Cowan describes how the local authorities became suspicious of his activities when he phoned to ask questions about the legality of boiling swill. On top of this frame of basic research, Cowan placed his own autobiographical experiences of growing up with collie dogs as his pets to provide the pig with the familiarity people associate with having a pet.
How does Cowan use everyday details in his novels?
At the start of the interview, Cowan reads a brief passage from his book Pig. The writing is visceral, raw, and heavy. There’s a sadness in what we learn right away that weighs over the entire short passage that concerns the circle of life. The description of the pig squealing outside, trying to wake its elderly master who we learn is now a widower. The scene feels reminiscent of how a dog in its yard might bark when it’s frustrated and wants the attention of its human. It’s a detail everyone would be familiar with. I also loved the detail of how the pig didn’t end up waking its owner, rather Cowan describes how the sound of the pig’s squealling fed into a dream the elderly master was having. It’s a beautiful way into what is going on in the man’s mind as he slumbers. And through the dream, we learn about the man and his first interaction with pigs as a kid. We learn of how he works alongside a girl, the person who would eventually become his wife, the person he’d spend the rest of his life with. And we learn of the man’s own grandfather, who is struggling to kill a pig in a slaughterhouse.
Cowan, Andrew (1994) Pig, London: Sceptre.
Cowan, Andrew (1996) Common Ground, London: Penguin.
Cowan, Andrew (2000) Crustaceans, London: Sceptre.
Cowan, Andrew (2005) What I Know, London: Sceptre.