Write What You Know

The worst advice given to Fran was in her final year of college when things seemed uncertain. She was at a stage in her life where nothing appeared before her clearly – not the man that she thought she could win over, not the professor that had ghosted her instead of writing her a recommendation letter for graduate school, and especially not the future.

Quite frankly, the advice given to her was unasked for, and it did nothing to solve any of the issues mentioned above, but there it was in her head in all its green, gooey ugliness and rage, rattling around in her head unbothered by the organ that was meant to exist in peace. It kept her awake at night. It caused her to slip on ice as she walked down the hill that her college building stood on. It distanced herself from the old friends that she had (following an argument that grew harder and harder to understand every day that passed), and worst of all, it kept her from being rational and calm.

The advice was given to her by a professor she detested but could not deny the influence of. It was unwanted in the way that time seemed to be thrust upon her. But it made sense just like the passing of time.

Write what you know.

What pathetic advice. Cowardly, too, coming from a White woman three times Fran’s age and a result of privilege and conniving tones. Creative writing classes were total garbage, Fran stood by this firmly. Writing could not ever be taught, so any advice should have been vaporized immediately too. Especially from successful writers such as the professor.

“Write what you know” was both a call out and utter bait. It was clear from her appearance what Fran knew, and more importantly how she was perceived with her darker skin and angry eyes that men found so unique on dating apps. “Stay in your lane,” the professor had inadvertently said.

Fran wasn’t writing a memoir, nor did she lead a life that was special enough to expand on for three hundred something pages. It was actually the opposite: her life was so boring that she could barely muster up enough to write a short story or a poem, and that was with the inclusion of her apparently spectacular imagination. She never asked her classmates if the professors wrote similar comments on their pieces. Creative writing is subjective.

On the topic of memoirs, an older White man in her class was writing one, about his life spent in a small apartment without his father, playing basketball, and growing into his pants. He wrote about the girls that rejected him for due to his bad choice in hairstyles and because he never had designer shoes. Seemed mundane enough, but he wrote so well, Fran found herself becoming increasingly jealous of such a hard life. Something good had clearly come out of it – a fleshed out autobiography and the attention of the successful writer.

Write what she knew? What did she know? What highlights could she bring forth and write in such extreme exaggeration that would be both believable and authentic, at least in portions?

What did any writer know? Wasn’t the purpose of writing to establish worlds that didn’t exist, to get something out that could never be imagined in reality?

What did Woolf know about the inner mechanics of a man’s brain that lurched with abject horror at the sound of a backfiring car?

There was enough material about ethnicity to write about, similar to her college essay. It would lurk in the bushes of trite, communal trauma of what it meant to be a woman, or rather a woman of color. It was her lane.

But, God, was it overdone! It was New York Times’s book of the year because publishers hated people that looked like her until there was struggle attracting them to a novel. It was what the English and History majors talked about while walking to class, newspapers under their arms, umbrellas in hand. It was what was talked about on radios and podcasts and on stages when a woman won Album of the Year. It was what the only woman of color professor talked about in communications classes because even though not everyone could relate to the topics of mass colonization and cleansing and identity erasure and sexual violence, it was still generally Bad Trauma.

She watched the TED Talks in class, sliding her eyes over to glare at her professor because she knew all this! All the negatives were bad ten years ago, a century ago, and today. The various stories that added to this cloud of bad life would just mixed together to create a general tone of “I hate being a person of color so now I need to make it your problem!”

It would have been easier to write a paper for Fran’s final project. There was so much research out there a few hot words away dropped into the search engine of her choosing. Morrison had already done that, hadn’t she? And Remarque for the men?

If Fran wanted to write a White character, would she be a traitor?

Write what she knew?

She knew that the man she’d been seeing was getting sick of her excuses, her lack of initiative, her fear of physical commitment, but all breakups ended that way. It wasn’t something to write novels about. The romance writers already did that, and the relationship she’d crawled out of was anything but romantic, truly.

“It’s just odd,” he’d said. His voice crackled through the phone, sad and tired. Fran pictured his small room, the bed on the floor, a looming desk to his left that seemed larger and more intimidating that the wooden ones she was used to in the library. He might have been laying in bed, his beautiful curls splayed on the pillow. “It’s odd that I’m putting in so much effort and barely getting anything back from you.”

They’d talked about this before, but the reminder that Fran had still not shown enough effort despite weeks of trying stung. Historically, her eyes would be filled with tears and her nights would be guilt ridden and long, yet there was nothing more to add to the situation so accepting defeat was easier.

“We clearly do not make each other happy,” Fran said as a parting message. “Let’s end it here.”

Write what she knew?

Well, perhaps nothing, but Fran certainly feared plenty.

There were things that left her devastated and bleary eyed in the mornings, but what lies could she fabricate alongside those fears to create actual stories? She feared she’d be a bad mother to whatever child was unlikely enough to have her, and she feared she’d never write something worthy of being included in any New York magazine, and she feared she’d never actually have a loving relationship with a man that thrived on healthy codependence, and she feared that all her good years would pass by her, and she feared that her old friends would be more successful than her because they didn’t pick petty fights like she did. She feared that falling in love would be like falling into despair, and she feared that she wouldn’t truly grow into the clothing she wore, and she feared she’d always be just a hair off with religion.

Plath already wrote all of that and more.

But to write what Faru “Fran” Kirrun knew?

She was 19. What did anyone know at 19?