Write what you don’t know

This is an extract from Write What You Don’t Know: 10 Steps to Writing with Confidence, Energy, and Flow by Allegra Huston and James Navé. Purchase the paperback here. It’s also available on Kindle and iBooks. The online video course is coming soon: join our mailing list for full details!

Before you began the Writer Training, we’ll guess, you mostly wrote what you knew. You told a story around the dinner table with great success, so you decided to write it up. You figured out a story and sat down to write it. Maybe you even embarked on a memoir, since you’ve had a pretty interesting life, and started putting the interesting bits into words. You heeded those writing teachers who tell you to “write what you know.”

Probably the writing didn’t come out on the page the way you thought it would. Maybe it felt stale, or dull, or somehow inauthentic when you read it over. But it didn’t feel dull or inauthentic in your mind, so what happened?

Your mind likes to make sense of things. It categorizes, makes meaning, and judges. It likes to make connections and patterns of cause-and-effect. Your memory makes tidy little interpreted stories, smoothing out the rough edges, erasing the inconvenient bits that undermine the assumptions it’s decided on. It won’t take a mystery into the future if it can help it. And it will put you in the right, and other people in the wrong, most of the time. 

But when you read a story with everything wrapped up neatly like this, the scenes and characters and emotions feel false. As a reader, you’re not engaged, which means your mirror neurons aren’t firing. You’re not recognizing true experience in the words you’re reading, even if you wrote them. Why?

When you’re living life, all kinds of things are happening that you’re unaware of. Zillions of possibilities exist in every direction. Only in retrospect do you have a clear conception of what happened and how you feel about it. So, when you’re writing about a past event and wanting a reader to connect with it, you have to find a way of getting yourself back into that moment-to-moment uncertainty. You have to travel back to the present of your past.

That’s why so many of our prompts put you into a state of uncertainty. They ask you to think about what you don’t remember, what you don’t know, what wasn’t there, what wasn’t what you thought it was.

You’ll feel your imagination getting excited—even as you may feel your rational mind resisting. It’s already done all that wrapping up! You might feel like you’re telling yourself that the wrappings are somehow wrong—that your interpretations and judgments and even memories of fact are not correct. That might be the case for any particular event or it might not. You won’t know until you ask yourself questions that your rational mind won’t think up on its own. You may have to push yourself to be open to those questions. If you feel resistance, that might indicate that there’s something uncomfortably true lurking in the shadows.

Don’t discount your rational mind. It does this wrapping up for a very good reason: to make order out of chaos and keep you sane. In the past, as you wrote, it may have turned away from any shadowy areas of uncertainty. But if you make an agreement with yourself to question your certainties by using prompts like these, you bring those lurkers into the light. Now your rational mind, which might have once held rigidly to what it knew, can be your ally in exploring other possibilities, because it likes to expand the borders of the known. Trust it to make a new order that includes the gems you unearth from the present of your past.

We’re skirting the border of psychotherapy here. Therapy is not the goal of the Writer Training—though you will finish it with more self-knowledge than you started. But writers are psychologists. Before the disciplines of psychology and psychotherapy were even invented, people turned to novels to understand human nature and get some ideas about how to navigate life. That’s the tradition all writers are working in, however far from realism they depart. Human experience is your subject matter. And what better specimen do you have for investigating human nature than you?

You don’t have to throw all your certainties out the window. Let’s say you know for sure that you’re walking west because it’s 4 p.m. and the sun is in your eyes. Okay—but what are you not seeing because the sun is blinding you? What are you not aware of because your mind is elsewhere? Your certainties might be inaccurate, or they might just be incomplete. 

In the past, you might have felt pressure to know what you were going to write. The pressure didn’t help you and the “knowing” probably didn’t help you either, because your imagination is bored by what you know. If you’ve ever tried to write a book about your area of expertise, you probably encountered this problem. It seemed like a great idea but writing was just a slog, like one of those “What I Did Over My Vacation” school essays.  Nothing but sheer willpower kept you going, and the end result was just as unsatisfying as the process of writing it. So, even if your project is something factual or instructional, you’ll need to find a way of writing what you don’t know in order to engage your imagination, energize yourself, and put verve in your writing. Can you find a new angle on the material? Can you question your way of doing things and explore whether your method really is the best way? Might there be other avenues of approach?

Writing what you don’t know, or what you don’t remember, engages your curiosity. If you’re intrigued by where the writing is taking you, your reader will be intrigued too. 

It’s liberating to write with an “I don’t know” mindset. Try looking at things you take for granted from a different perspective. Here’s a really simple example. Let’s say you’re five feet tall, so, as an adult human, you think of yourself as small. Now stand over an ant colony. Are you still small?

This is the thought experiment at the heart of Gulliver’s Travels. When Gulliver goes to Lilliput, he’s a giant because the people are the size of mice. Then he goes to Brobdingnag, where the people are gigantic and he’s, relatively, the size of a Lilliputian. Two centuries later, Einstein imagined himself so small he could ride a beam of light—which led him to the equation for the theory of relativity.

The purpose of certainty is to make you feel safe and secure. But certainty is fragile, because it limits you to what you think you know, and if that’s disproved, then what? Obviously, there’s far more that you don’t know—a whole universe of possibilities for your imagination to play with! Here’s another example. You know that most animals have legs and the wheel is a human invention. In the third volume of His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman imagined a planet where volcanoes left lava trails like roads, so the inhabitants evolved with wheels instead of legs.

Do you know Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses”? He’s a veteran of the Trojan War, who wandered for 10 years as he tried to get back home. Now, an old man, he feels dull and stale at home. He’s bored of what he knows, and longs to set sail again.

I am a part of all that I have met

Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough

Gleams that untraveled world

Whose margin fades forever and forever as I move.

You could think of your own untraveled world as your unthought thoughts, your unconsidered possibilities, your unchallenged memories. The parts of your imagination and lived experience that await your exploration in writing—whose end is never in sight.