Because, of course, then you’ll be liberated from the fear of offending them. Or you can write about them, even better, right? You can write about how crazy they were or how they treated you or what they did to keep you from writing. Right?
It’s true that writers need to be a little fearless when they choose their subjects. They have to write violent or dark or–gasp–sexy scenes and if they’re worried what their families or close friends think, they’ll hold back, they’ll soft-pedal things. It’s true that the great writers are the ones who tackle subjects nobody wants to talk about. The ideas and concepts that might make them unpopular.
Right?
I don’t entirely buy it. Oh, it’s good to be a little libertine in your choices as a writer. You want drama and excitement and a little adrenaline to spice up your stories. But there are two reasons I think this is, if not terrible advice, at least worth questioning. The first is that your parents–actually, let’s open this up and say your loved ones, regardless of their legal relationship to you–are the best support staff you’re going to get. They can nurture you and be your best first readers and their stories can inform what you write. One of the best, if not the best moment of my entire career, happened at a dinner table one night while I was visiting my parents.
“Here are my five favorite David Wellington novels, and why,” my father said. Then he went on to list and describe them.
My Dad had read my books. And liked them. He’s passed, now, and I miss so much the support, encouragement, and love he gave me. While he was still alive he got to see me succeed as a writer. He was so proud. I wouldn’t trade anything for that.
Writing is a solitary activity and it can be soul-crushing. The isolation and daily discouragement you get as a writer is your worst enemy. Your loved ones are what can keep you going in the darkest moments. Don’t see them as impediments. See them as resources. If they truly love you, of course they’ll want you to use their stories, to adapt their anecdotes. You can’t write in a vacuum.
The second reason that this particular piece of advice is bad is that strictures and limitations are what make art great.
The pure, free play of the writer’s mind gave us Ulysses, and To The Lighthouse. Those are great books… but they’re rare. And they should be. Most great stories come from some kind of artificial rule, some boundary set up against the author’s progress by forces they couldn’t control.
There’s a reason why the Monty Python movies aren’t as good as the television sketches. Forced to work within arbitrary rules of censorship on state media, the Pythons were forced to go absurd–they couldn’t just make endless jokes about shit and fucking, so they had to get surreal.
Almost all pulp fiction passed through a rigorous gauntlet of editors and gate-keepers, people who either demanded the stories be less salacious–or more so. Then there’s the greatest road block of them all: the readership, in all of its strident demands and capricious wants. I would argue–and I know there are many who disagree–that Lovecraft’s greatest stories are the ones he wrote specifically for the Weird Tales audience. Not the Poe pastiches and noodly nightmares he created when nobody was watching.
Editors refine stories. Audiences push authors to find universal themes, to find why stories are important. Writing in a vacuum would ignore those tensions, pretend they don’t exist.
For the sake of your readership, and your own mental health–don’t write like your parents are already dead. Right the story that’s going to make your father (or mother, or wife, or cousin, or crazy best friend) proud of you.
DAVID WELLINGTON 