You have the story. Maybe it’s memoir—your life. Maybe it’s biography—someone else’s life. Maybe you’re writing about science or politics or religion—which touch on many people’s lives. But even though the story is about life, for some reason it’s lifeless on the page.
It may not be lifeless when you tell it aloud—around a dinner table, for example. But something happens when you put it on the page. It loses the immediacy and verve it has in your head.
The Problem is You’re Writing What You Know
Maybe that sounds strange, and maybe you had a writing mentor who told you to write what you know. That advice isn’t wrong. But too often, it’s misinterpreted to mean you should write only what you know. Or it’s misinterpreted to mean that if you know something you should be able to write about it well, and if you can’t that means you’re just not a good writer.
Not so! Good writers—writers who make their story vivid and vibrant on the page—are often writing what they don’t know.
Writing what you don’t know doesn’t mean writing from ignorance. For example, a rocket scientist writing about plumbing will run into trouble unless they do lots of research. What it means is not trying to figure out what you’ll write before you write it. Not just downloading what’s already familiar to your mind.
Think about it for a moment: we all don’t know far more than we know. We don’t know what’s going to happen in five seconds’ time. We don’t know what’s going on in the next room or the next state. We don’t know what’s going on in someone else’s head. Often, we don’t know what’s going on in our own heads. So, not knowing is part of the fabric of lived reality.
But when you know a story, it’s tempting to leave out all that not-know stuff. And the result of 100% knowing, and 0% not knowing, is that you lose the flavor of life.
When you write what you don’t know, you allow your writing to surprise you.
Crafting a Memoir from What I Didn’t Remember
When I began working on my memoir, Love Child, I thought I knew the story. But when I wrote up a few scenes, I hated them: flat, boring, self-conscious, lifeless. Worse, memories that I thought were solid dissolved once I imagined myself back in them. I said to myself, “Dammit, if I can’t write what I remember I’ll just have to write what I don’t remember!” That was just to keep me in the chair that day—but to my huge surprise, the “don’t remember” material not only made it into the final book but was some of the most powerful material.
Why? Because readers could identify with the slipperiness of memory. They recognized the tang of truth in my admission of what I didn’t know.
It can be upsetting to discover that you don’t actually know what you thought you knew—until you realize this is a positive advantage in writing, because now you’re not so attached to your existing story. You can allow your imagination to explore into the shadows, the background, other possibilities for what could have happened or what it meant. You can surprise yourself.
The poet Robert Frost said, “No surprise for the writer; no surprise for the reader.” A surprised reader is a reader who keeps reading.
You don’t have to take my word for it. Notice how often in The Liar’s Club Mary Karr writes that she doesn’t remember something or doesn’t remember it fully. The gaps underscore the importance and emotional weight of what she does remember.
A character who doesn’t know everything is a character alive on the page. If you’re writing a biography, what does your subject not remember? What do they not know? What do you not know about them? Explore these questions and suddenly you’ll feel your writing take on a life of its own.
Or let’s say you’re writing polemic; you want to convince people of your point of view. Why should they care? How might their lives be changed in ways you haven’t yet thought about? If you want your argument to land powerfully, explore the lives it’s going to land in.
Mirror Neurons: The Writer’s Most Powerful Tool
Writing what you don’t know is also the secret to getting your reader to care. You may have heard of mirror neurons. They’re what make us feel joy or suffering when we see joy or suffering on someone else’s face. Body mirrors body, and we feel an emotion that wasn’t originally our own. Quite amazing, really, this human capacity! And it’s what we as writers are aiming for.
Your reader’s imagination will make the body you describe real, and their mirror neurons will fire. And in order to describe how emotions manifest in a body, it’s a good idea to feel them in your own. And when you’re in your head, focusing on what you know, you’re not feeling your body. All that rational-mind stuff—logic and analysis and ambition and anxiety and mental chatter—gets in the way. But when you write with a don’t-know mindset, you generate material that’s authentic to the feeling of being alive.
Suddenly, you’re using yourself to convey the character you’re writing about, like a musician uses a guitar to convey a song.
Even when I sit down to write short nonfiction pieces like this one, I don’t think about it much beforehand—because if I do, I’ll be downloading what I’ve thought, writing what I know. The best results come when I have a starting point, but I don’t know where it will take me. It’s also a lot more fun, because my curiosity is engaged. What will come, once my pen or fingers start moving? Inevitably, something that surprises me.
Having taught writing workshops for over 20 years, I know that people like their writing best when it surprises them.
How Can You Create the Conditions to Surprise Yourself?
Use image prompts and random word lists to jog you out of your usual approach to a scene. Play music that puts you in a certain mood. Ask yourself questions about your story, your characters, your viewpoint that you’ve never asked before.
It may seem counterintuitive to write what you don’t know. But give it a try. Set a timer for 10 minutes and write by hand (this is the Imaginative Storm writing method). Choose a scene from your memoir or biography or the life of someone your polemical argument would affect. Then, consider a question you don’t know the answer to. For example: What’s not there? What else could have happened? What else might that person be thinking about, aside from the story you’re telling?
This is research. You’re generating material, not writing a draft. You’re asking your imagination to give you a gift: an image, an insight, a simile, a whole new perspective. You won’t use all of it, but hey, it only took you 10 minutes. And very likely, somewhere in that material—often about two-thirds of the way in—you’ll find a gem that you could never have mined any other way.
Author Bio
Allegra Huston, author of the bestselling memoir Love Child and the novel A Stolen Summer, is co-founder of Imaginative Storm Writing Workshops. With James Navé, she co-authored Creative Writing: The Imaginative Storm Method and Write What You Don’t Know: Imaginative Storm Writer Training. She is also the author of the short guides How to Edit and Be Edited and co-author of How to Read for an Audience, and writer/producer of the award-winning short film Good Luck, Mr. Gorski. She was previously Editorial Director of Weidenfeld & Nicolson, one of the UK’s most respected publishers, and has taught the Imaginative Storm writing method at prestigious universities and writing programs, including the nonfiction department of Iowa Writers Workshop. Get Your Quick Guide to the Imaginative Storm Method downloadable checklist at my website here.
