An Act of Discovery

by Creative Nonfiction contributor Adam Knight

Writing is an act of discovery. -- Natalie Goldberg

Discovery of what? Sometimes, writers plumb the depths of other people's thoughts and emotions. Sometimes, writers discover something about the world they did not previously understand. Sometimes they learn about themselves.

My essay "Little Bird" in Bacopa Literary Review 2021 is a vignette about a moment in my life so small that I doubt anyone else involved even remembers it. Yet it was a pivotal moment for me, one that confirmed something I had begun to suspect in adolescence. I was different from other boys. I was a misfit on my baseball team--inept, passive, and introverted. In the dugout I found a fledgling baby bird and vowed to save it from two teammates who were unlike me in every way.

Nick and Scott were best friends, and like me, were thirteen. Unlike me, they were very good ballplayers. Nick was a small, wiry, slap hitter who could turn singles into doubles. His father owned our town's biggest car dealership. Scott was tall and broad, a big bruiser of a kid who had set records crushing homeruns his last year of Little League. He had gained infamy in sixth grade by tasting a piece of the cow heart we were dissecting in science class. Today, he's a cop.

I failed. They found the bird and decided to take it to the high school field to "park it." For years, that incident proved to me that I was tender-hearted and virtuous. I never challenged the assertion; I built my identity around it. When I finally decided to write about it a few years ago, it started as an exercise in recollection. Gradually, my memory and imagination collaborated to the point where I could smell the wet grass and hear the scrape of aluminum bats on concrete dugout floors. But I kept writing, and as so often happens in writing, seeing the thing on the page took me places I did not expect.

That day on the baseball field was twenty-five years ago. When I relived it in my mind, I was always the hero. But when I wrote it as a narrative, I scrutinized my protagonist a  little more. His passivity was not a virtue, but was a flaw that allowed an innocent creature to die.

Still, many years later, I can hear the cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep of a helpless voice, cut short because I was too fearful of being mocked. Nick and Scott did not kill that bird alone. My silence was their accomplice.

The final lines of the essay were not just a surprise twist to the reader, they were a surprise to me. A surprise I discovered in myself through the revelatory power of writing.

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Adam Knight is a writer and teacher in northern New Jersey. His debut novel, At the Trough, was published in 2019 by NineStar Press and his fiction and essays have been published in a number of publications. His story "Hoping for Red" was published at Escape Pod in December 2018. He has recently completed a cosmic horror novel about the Titanic, The Fire Below the Waves.

 

Write What You Know

by 2020 Associate Editor James Singer

One of the most common pieces of advice for budding writers is to “write what you know.” But what does that actually mean? Does it mean to write about events that have happened in your life? Does it mean that you should only write about subjects which you know? Does it maybe mean that you should gather inspiration from aspects of your life, be that feelings or relationships or experiences? In my experience, “write what you know” can encompass any and all of these.

You can write about your own life, in the form of a memoir or travel journals or other such creative nonfiction. By doing so, you share your experiences with others, help people going through similar trials and tribulations to what you’ve gone through. This sort of writing is also a way to memorialize your life, to be remembered and leave a legacy for future generations.

Another way to write what you know is to write about subjects you know well. For example, a truck driver writing stories about life on the road, a retired detective writing mysteries, or a historian writing historical fiction. And if you don’t know the subject, then know what you write: do research, learn about what is involved in your story. If you do this, your story will be that much more believable, and you won’t have someone who does know the subject telling you what you got wrong.

Sometimes you can go a little farther, and rather than writing directly about what you’ve experienced or centering your writing around a knowledge base, there will be some experience or feeling, some event, anything that catches your imagination, and it will be a seed that turns into a story later down the road. Oftentimes, the story that results will barely resemble the event that inspired it, but the roots can be traced back to it, back to something you know. 

No matter how you “write what you know,” in the end what matters is that you’re writing.

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 This post appeared first in the Writers Alliance of Gainesville blog;

reprinted here with permission.