One of the central tenets of writing is that you should always “write what you know.” In the words of acclaimed author P. D. James: “All experience, whether it is painful or whether it is happy, is somehow stored up and sooner or later it’s used.” And I truly adhere to this philosophy. Our pasts are our fuel. Our memories are our ammunition. And our own unique life story is the thread from which we sew the tapestry of human creation.
That’s why, whenever I’m writing, I always make it a point of pride to draw from the rich wellspring of my lived experiences and write exclusively about the terrible relationships I have had with women who look like my mother.
Everyone has a story to tell. And my story is one where I keep dating emotionally distant brunettes who used to dance in college.
The onus on every great author is to create an immersive world that evokes both a sense of verisimilitude and authenticity. Whether it’s Hemingway, who used his actual experiences as an ambulance driver in Italy to write his seminal masterpiece A Farewell to Arms, or whether it’s me, writing about men who only date women who look like my mommy… if a story has a tangible sense of truth underpinning it, it is, by definition, guaranteed to be all the more compelling.
Take, for example, my unpublished science fiction novella, tentatively titled The Shrew-Woman of Planet Upsilon. In this 150-page space opera / dramedy, my story’s main character, space marine Drake Lancaster, enters into a tumultuous, four-month-long relationship with a seductive space alien named Rebecca (the story’s titular “Shrew-Woman”). As the story goes on to reveal, the Shrew-Woman in question is a 5′1″ brunette with whom Drake cannot connect on an emotional or physical level. Rebecca was also a dancer in college.
As the astute reader will hopefully notice, this story works well only because it successfully mimics the reality of the author’s unique human experience. Drake feels real because I am real. And so, in the story’s climax, when Drake tells Rebecca that she’s, quote, “a freaking psycho who doesn’t know how to make a man feel good,” that line only works because I said the same exact thing to my psycho ex-girlfriend Melissa, right after she accused me of sabotaging our relationship by constantly comparing her to my mother.
Would the emotional journey of Drake be as effective if I had not dated an unending string of mousy, flexible brunette women? Why don’t I answer that question with another one: Would F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby be just as poignant and affecting if the author had not personally lived through the wanton excesses of the 1920s?
I don’t think so.
Or take, for example, the plot of my dark comedic horror screenplay, The Mommies Who Ruined Their Babies. In an archly self-aware nod to George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, this story is set in an abandoned, post-apocalyptic shopping mall where the screenplay’s main character, REI employee Johnny Granite, is besieged on all sides by an army of thousands upon thousands of mousy brunette women who all have experience dancing at the collegiate level. And the only way out is for Johnny to date each and every single one of these women, one after the other.
Answer me this, dear reader… would I have been able to create a scenario this horrifying and relatable without having first experienced it myself? Not very likely.
Along those lines, I have also written a collection of short stories, which includes the following thrilling tales of terror:
Clearly, the overarching theme of “unhealthy mommy love” is pervasive throughout the bulk of my entire oeuvre—much like how John Steinbeck wrote predominantly about farmers during the Great Depression; or how Stephen King only writes books about authors with crippling cocaine addictions. This topic is, for me, the only subject that I alone can depict with the utmost authority.
In summation and in conclusion, as the reader of this essay should recognize, the adage “write what you know” is not merely a trenchant piece of advice for any aspiring wordsmith. But, more than that, it is an ethos that I have personally integrated into every element of my writing. From plot to characters and even to symbolism, my writing is thoroughly inundated with allusions and references to my self-destructive dating history. In short, I am defined by my crippling mommy issues. So that is what I must write about.
Well, that, and also about my crippling daddy issues. I’ve got a ton of those, too, unfortunately.
