Write About What You Don’t Know
Happy St. Patrick’s Day—the most glorious day on the calendar, save the one marked forever for when the Savior was born.
Such a special celebration, one that illegally adopts all comers, drunk or not, as Irishable if only for a day—and t’is the perfect time for an imperfect writing lesson: when you write about characters who are not you, you have become a writer.
Simple, right, even for an Irishman drinking down many too many draughts. But the implications are profound and not automatically sanguine in our pre-post-pandemic world. A bit of blarney is afoot in the creative world today that states only a Black person can write of being Black; only a woman can put pen to paper about being a woman; and so on.
Authenticity is the watchword—and if you cross this line you better watch out. Talk about blarney! This is now the law as writ by those who don’t know nothing.
I have on my shelf a novel called SINS OF THE FLESH, written by a man (i.e, me) in the voice of a billionaire ex-nun who becomes a radical eugenicist and tries to create a town without men.
How dare me?
At least I came by it honestly. Though not a nun—or even a woman—I was raised Catholic. My Aunt Connie Murray, may she rest, was a nun for 38 years before she pulled the plug, giving me the advantage of watching her through the decades when I was growing up. And then there was the newspaper story I wrote about Sister Mary Daly, a radical feminist nun who taught at Boston College.
Give Sister Mary’s politics to Aunt Connie and you have my character, Eleanor O’Kell, written of course by a man.
My point is as clear as the red nose on your face. When you become a writer, you are instantly granted the right to be anyone you want to be.
I have written about my Irish family ad nauseam in my BOOK OF O’KELLS series, and if seven novels don’t make you want to throw up, perhaps the next one will. I am 91 percent Irish, and I would die happy as an Irish American writer if one day my name appeared but once in the same sentence as William Kennedy and Tim O’Brien. As for Irish writers proper, no one will ever approach James Joyce, God himself come to life in text of his own invention.
You can write about what you know, or you can write about what you don’t know to find out what you think—or both. In the near-times I have written fiction about a Black sailor and a Mughal princess in India and a transgender teenager in Malibu and a white cracker from North Carolina and a young Black woman, a summa cum laude, heading for Stanford Law.
Even so I’m still an Irish American writer, the proud inheritor of a storytelling tradition like no other on earth. And I don’t drink even on St. Patty’s Day, because if you’re Irish and a writer the only way the two will mix is in a cocktail on the way to getting drunk. But I did long ago internalize the Irish hatred of oppression and hypocrisy and the corruption of power. I find these truths to be inspirational, because no true Irish writer ever tires of a good yarn about throwing off the yoke.
So happy St. Patrick’s Day! Today we all celebrate as one authentic human race willing to embrace knowledge of our differences. More writing is to be done tomorrow, about that young Black woman and the Mohawk from Princeton who loves her. I can’t wait to find out what they do next.\