Write what you know?

How our lives inform our fiction, even when we’re writing about the long-ago

Old Woman Tree

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Novice writers are often advised to “Write what you know.” That can feel very limiting. You have only had one life, you only “know” a narrow swath of human experience. So is it good advice?

I struggled for years to write a novel about women in 19^th-century Oregon. I had grown up there (Oregon, not the 1870s), had spent my childhood roaming the eastern side of the Cascade Mountains with my family, visiting graveyards and ghost towns and soaking up the atmosphere of powwows and rodeos. I played Wagon Train and imagined myself as a homesteader. But grownup me wanted to write a book that included Indigenous women in major roles, reflecting their importance to both the present and past of the region. Despite reading volumes, talking to folks, and even learning a little of the language spoken still by the descendants of people I wanted in my book, I never knew enough – about their experience or, at that point, about writing fiction—to do them justice. So I stopped, put it aside.

And when I was ready to begin a new project, I decided to start from what I knew: being an old woman. I have lived many years, had many experiences and relationships, am living in an aging body. Younger people often look at me in a certain way: over the hill, irrelevant, a Boomer. People tend to believe what they’ve been told, that old women have always been seen as irrelevant, burdensome, ugly, frightening. But is that true? Exploring that question in my fiction led me to some surprising places.

As I wrote An Uncertain Age, I learned some of the specifics of an ordinary woman’s life in Europe’s High Medieval period. Almost no information about peasants made it into historical chronicles, of course. Very few outside the Church could write, so there are no peasants’ letters or diaries to examine. Stories of women that made it into print reflected the biases of their male writers and of their patriarchal society. But recently social historians have found traces of women’s lives in the records of manor courts, where most peasants sought justice.

Court documents reveal what people did for a living, how they ran afoul of their neighbors or local authorities, even what they paid to marry or sell ale. What’s more, the records show that women often appeared in these courts in their own right, not just as “wife of John the Smith,” but as brewsters, farmers, midwives. Thanks to the hard work of recent historians (Peter Larson and Judith Bennett chief among my sources for this novel), I was able to flesh out the context in which my widow, Margaret Surteys, was trying to remake herself in the wake of her husband’s death.

But writing historical fiction is not all research. As I wrote, I slipped bits of my own life into my characters. The physical sensation of panic when my eight-year-old didn’t show up on the bus one day after school, the constant worry about how to support a family on low wages, how it felt to succeed at something difficult after others doubted me. The circumstances may have been different, but the issues and emotions were the same. We use our own life experiences to make sense of new ones, real or imagined. By drawing on my own life and those of people near to me, I could more fully develop my characters into whole humans, people who readers could understand and relate to.

It’s hard to write without letting your own experience seep into your tale. This, I think, is part of what the “own voices” movement taught me. Not that I couldn’t write about lives and people whose experiences were different from my own, but that my own experiences would seep in to whatever I wrote, and that I might not spot those intrusions. The result: a twisted tale, a distortion.

People have been misrepresented or erased for as long as we have had the written word. That’s certainly true of peasants in medieval England, and of women of all classes throughout history. I don’t want to add to that sad story. With An Uncertain Age, I had the chance to write ordinary women—women like me—back into history. To help modern readers see the connections between that distant time and our own by using what I have learned by living in the world.