“How can you get any sense of wonder into a story when everybody tells you to write from experience?"
The clue here is in "when" and "everyone"... Dunno where this novelist's been studying creative writing, or whom he/she's been talking to, but nobody I know has been teaching "write what you know" in that simplistic way for years. My mantra was "write what you can persuade people you know" and you can do that in a lot of ways, including research, empathy and sheer bloody chutzpah. Of course it can also be via experience, and IMO that often produces the most authentic sense of "wonder". I would cite My Family And Other Animals, where it's surely done through pinpoint-accurate observation and very clear recollection (plus some embroidery, and why not). The young Gerald holding a tortoise, diving in the Med or observing Larry's latest eccentric friend, is writing what he knows and is in a perpetual state of wonder.
Re the Bildungsroman, I've always thought it should be not so much about finding your place in the world as finding a way you can accommodate yourself to the world and get on with it. Associated with this is knowing what's most important to you; as Quesntin Crisp once said, most people end up doing if not what they want, at least what they prefer. Trying to think of examples from children's literature, I guess Jim Hawkins learns, first, that he prefers to rely on himself rather than any adult, and second, that for him at least, liking does not always go with desert; he knows Silver would kill him if it became convenient, but he still likes the bloke (and knows that Silver, in his own way, likes him). He ends up, as Huck Finn does, with different values from the society around him.
But actually the ending of that type I always think of is both adult and cinematic rather than book; the really fairly sad ending, in many ways,of It's A Wonderful Life, where George has in no way given up his longing to travel and do something with his life, but knows he never will because in the end other things mattered more to him.
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Date: 2010-08-15 04:29 pm (UTC)The clue here is in "when" and "everyone"... Dunno where this novelist's been studying creative writing, or whom he/she's been talking to, but nobody I know has been teaching "write what you know" in that simplistic way for years. My mantra was "write what you can persuade people you know" and you can do that in a lot of ways, including research, empathy and sheer bloody chutzpah. Of course it can also be via experience, and IMO that often produces the most authentic sense of "wonder". I would cite My Family And Other Animals, where it's surely done through pinpoint-accurate observation and very clear recollection (plus some embroidery, and why not). The young Gerald holding a tortoise, diving in the Med or observing Larry's latest eccentric friend, is writing what he knows and is in a perpetual state of wonder.
Re the Bildungsroman, I've always thought it should be not so much about finding your place in the world as finding a way you can accommodate yourself to the world and get on with it. Associated with this is knowing what's most important to you; as Quesntin Crisp once said, most people end up doing if not what they want, at least what they prefer. Trying to think of examples from children's literature, I guess Jim Hawkins learns, first, that he prefers to rely on himself rather than any adult, and second, that for him at least, liking does not always go with desert; he knows Silver would kill him if it became convenient, but he still likes the bloke (and knows that Silver, in his own way, likes him). He ends up, as Huck Finn does, with different values from the society around him.
But actually the ending of that type I always think of is both adult and cinematic rather than book; the really fairly sad ending, in many ways,of It's A Wonderful Life, where George has in no way given up his longing to travel and do something with his life, but knows he never will because in the end other things mattered more to him.