When I lived with Julie at the Kelton house in LA, Julie started taking fiction writing classes out of the home of writer John Rechy. She took two or three of them as I recall and would always come home with funny stories about things he said. Back then, she passed along a few of his online essays to me and I just re-read them.
One is a very funny pastiche of famous writers if they had been tasked with rewriting the famous introduction “it was a dark and story night.” It’s very funny and well worth reading in its entirely.
The other essay was called “On Writing: The Terrible Three Rules” and the essay reconsiders the biggest cliches writing students are given: (1) show, don’t tell, (2) write about what you know and (3) always have a sympathetic character for the reader to relate to.
He calls the first point “major nonsense” and makes a very good case for exposition in some of our most famous works of literature. The rule “disallows setting” and without it would “obfuscate situation.” After all, we don’t call it story-showing, he says.
He then provides some tips on how to handle exposition so it doesn’t overwhelm a story.
I’m actually very glad he makes the point about “write what you know” because so many of us write into what we don’t know in a kind of effort to find something to know.
Who wants to discover what they already know? Granted, there are plenty of writers writing to show off to the rest of us what they already think they know, but I would argue those aren’t the best ones.
Writers write in many cases to get into the heads of characters they don’t understand and that’s where the humanity is half the time. This reminds me of seeing Werner Herzog speak before a screening of his movie Grizzly Man and admitting he hated the outdoors, absolutely hated nature. So his interviewer asked him why he picked a very flawed outdoorsman as his subject? And I’ll never forget what he said: to try to understand where someone so different from himself was coming from. That’s what he was interested in exploring.
Honestly, these are precarious times for this kind of project. We’re admonished all the time for not staying in our lane, especially our gender, sexual-orientation and racial lane. And we’re unintentionally self-segregating when we do this. And I don’t think this well-intentioned but short-sighted self-segregating will end well.
Anyway, I personally wouldn’t want to bother with fiction if I had to stick to writing characters who were mousy, straight, white, suburban females. But if we proceed to “write about what we don’t or barely know” we need to be open to (1) getting it wrong as writers and (2) extending more forgiveness as readers. Or else we will cease to have conversations and revert back to the eternal us v. them.
John Rechy lists all the writers who wrote about experiences they never had, experiences of war, crime, writing about other genders and a famous spinster who wrote one of our most indelible love stories.
And like...The Wizard of Oz. Fiction is “verisimilitude,” Rechy says, not reality.
For the last point Rechy lists all the unsympathetic characters we’ve loved to read, starting with Hamlet and Willy Loman, “Catharine and Heathcliff are horrors (and still manage—at times—to tear our hearts out),” Rechy says. They don’t have to be sympathetic, just fascinating.
Which is not to say any of this is easy, to create fascinating characters with artful exposition and verisimilitude. Which, I guess, is why Rechy was offering those fiction writing classes.
Short and sweet. I’m actually hanging on to these.
