Write what you (don't) know

Playing with knowing, memory, fact, and fiction

The advice to “write what you know” is so well-worn, it’s achieved punchline status; it’s more a meme than a maxim.

As I’ve mentioned before in this newsletter, I’ve been writing a novel, called THE SHREWDNESS, for the better part of two years, and it’s given me a lot of time to meditate on the genesis of fiction.

And of course we write what we know. What else is there? Even our wildest imaginings are conceived in our own minds, the organ that knows us best, our eternal captive.

But we also write to understand the world better, to expand our knowing. This is particularly true with non-fiction. The very act of researching a topic, drawing connections, and organizing our thoughts becomes an exercise in discovery. Often, I don’t know what I think about something until I try to write about it. The writing informs the knowing, and vice-versa, in a symbiotic circle. You write what you know, you know what you write, and your understanding deepens on both ends.

Fiction is another story (pun intended). Miraculously, “what we know” becomes a springboard, catapulting us into the final frontier of the unknown—the 100% manufactured, imaginary narrative. As with theater, fiction seeks to tell the truth by lying. Even if their story is about monsters or martians, the novelist, or short story writer, hopes to capture some ineffable piece of the human experience—by concocting a yarn in an alternate reality. To perform this magic trick, we must start with our own knowledge and alchemize it into something else—a third plane that straddles reality and fantasy. Sometimes, the result is art. Other times, it’s crap. But the effort always changes the source material. What was known is forever altered by the process, and that knowing shape-shifts into something new.

I’ve been playing with these thoughts recently in a chapter of my book that juxtaposes two life experiences for the hero, Maya. I don’t want Maya to be an “author insert,” which is a main character that acts as a simulacrum of its creator, and can end up being a thinly-veiled author-avatar. So, I tasked myself with giving her an experience I’ve never had—the experience of giving birth.

Maya’s birth story is paired with a fictionalized version of an experience I actually did have: When I was eight, a plane and a helicopter crashed into each other over my elementary school, killing everyone aboard both aircraft and taking the lives of two children while they played at recess. It was a life-altering tragedy.

One could write an entire novel about a plane crash at an elementary school and the attending emotional fallout, perhaps focusing on the character arc of a particular teacher, kid, or parent, or maybe even an EMT. (Maybe I will someday.) But I didn’t here. The event is re-imagined in a short chapter, as a piece of backstory character-building, in a section that does not advance the plot but helps the reader get to know our hero a little better.

Although I embellished and altered details, writing the fake helicopter crash scene helped me newly understand and articulate the effect the real tragedy had on my nascent world view. And writing the birth scene, patched together from my friends’ accounts of their labors and from internet research, gave me newfound awe, compassion, and understanding for an experience that remains foreign. My ‘knowing’ of both things has changed.

The book is still a work in progress. The words below will probably change a million times in revisions. But I’m sharing an amended excerpt of the drafted chapter here (right now, it’s chapter 10) as an exercise in writing what you know, and writing what you don’t, all in an attempt to tell some small part of the big truth about being alive.

EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER TEN - THE SHREWDNESS

My daughter Salma was the greatest gift of my life. But I almost didn’t survive giving birth to her. She was impatient—so eager to experience Earth from outside my womb that she kicked and writhed her way into being six weeks early. Sometimes I think she had some primordial knowledge that her life would be short, so she didn’t want to waste any time getting here. As desperate as I was to meet her, I wasn’t ready; we weren’t ready.   

It was late summer when she came to us. The stickiness of August had settled like a smog in the atmosphere. The thrill of longer days and spending time outdoors had faded—the easiness of May a distant memory.

Hauling around the weight of Salma in my gut was worse in the heat and I dreaded having to brave the scorch of the outside for more than a few seconds. Days were spent in drapey white fabrics, supine on the couch, snacking and lounging like a cherub in a roman painting.

Our electricity bill was through the roof. The air conditioner blasted me with frigid air ceaselessly. But no matter how glacial I kept the interior of our house, I was always sweating. A fine mist covered my body, I couldn’t get comfortable, and Salma was so restless, she wriggled in my belly from morning to night.

Any interruption to the tightly-managed chill of my living room was torture. If Adnan opened the door to run an errand, or take out the trash, or get the mail, the split-second blast of scalding air was such an assault on my skin that I couldn’t stop myself from screaming “Close the door!” at top-volume, even though I knew he was about to shut it momentarily. I was testy and hormonal. We were snapping at each other often. And the heat has a way of turning the volume up on low-simmering conflict.

In a way, Salma’s early arrival was a preview of how wise and thoughtful she would be during her brief life. It’s as if she sensed how untenable this last trimester was for us and accelerated her arrival to ease the tension. Even if we weren’t fully prepared for Salma’s early arrival, it was a blessing for our marriage, softening us towards the world and each other. And like many of life’s rewards, it was hard-won.

One August morning, the house in disarray, the crib still in its box, the nursery half-painted, Salma demanded to be freed from my womb. Contractions accelerated quicker than expected. My water broke in the kitchen while Adnan wasn’t home. I called an uber to the hospital and he met me there.

In the delivery room, as labor progressed, a cascading series of tragedies unfolded, each one more severe than the next.

First, a complication required an emergency c-section: Salma’s head wasn’t in the right position for a vaginal birth. Then, I had a rare adverse reaction to the spinal-epidural administered for the caesarean. The medicine invaded a vein and triggered a seizure—the only seizure of my life to date. Adnan told me later I looked possessed, like a true believer in a traveling revival tent, overcome with the hysteria of faith, my limbs no longer my own.

After the seizure abated, and they were able to excavate Salma from my belly, I was only able to clutch her tiny body against my chest for a minute before I began to lose a troubling amount of blood. A searing pain became so pervasive I couldn’t even pinpoint its origin—the hurt was everywhere, in all parts; I had no memory of what it was like to be without it.

I remember wishing that I’d savored every moment up until that point that wasn’t painful; I’d never realized how fleeting the times without discomfort truly were. “Why didn’t I appreciate it?,” I thought in my woozy stupor, “all those moments where I felt just OK or neutral? I’ll never take the absence of pain for granted again,” I promised, my hospital gown slick with sweat against my skin, the metallic scent of blood filling the room.

Graver in tone now, the doctors told me I was suffering from postpartum hemorrhage. Salma was ripped from my arms, and a flurry of beeps and commotion consumed me. I slipped in and out of consciousness in a lurid haze of gore and excruciation. My body didn’t feel like my own; it was a garish vessel, torn open, splayed out as a sacrifice, my life for hers. In that sterile hospital room, I feared death more than I ever have; I could feel it close by, a dark shadow growing larger around me.

As my life slipped away, one doctor said to another with alarm, “Shit, her blood pressure’s dropping,” and it had a high-note of danger, the tone in someone’s voice that tells you, at the cellular level, that things have gotten serious.

I’ve never been religious, but I prayed. Over and over, in my head, I repeated the words, “God, please let me live.” And I bargained, promising that if I made it through, I would be more appreciative of life’s blessings, more attuned to others, and would recommit to improving all my shortcomings. My mind played all the hits: The same predictable pleas for second chances invoked by everyone who’s ever tasted the edge of their own mortality.

As I prayed, I envisioned my incantations repelling the encroaching darkness, extending a halo of light around me, keeping me safe—beating back death. I imagined my words, “please let me live,” as a forcefield. And that’s the last thing I remember.

I’ll never know if my prayers were answered or if it was the pure randomness of the universe, but I awoke a day later, shocked to be alive. Blinking awake to the low hum of machines, I looked around the room. Adnan was slumped nearby, asleep in a chair to my left. Salma was nowhere.

As I hoisted myself up to look for my baby, a nurse arrived hurriedly at my side. Her nametag read “Linda.” Soothing me with a soft voice, she smiled down at me, resting a hand on my shoulder, and said, “I’m so happy to see you awake. It was touch-and-go there for a while.”

And then, she summed me up with three words I’ll never forget: “You’re a survivor.”

She said it with pride, as if she were my own mother. And the only response I could give was, “I know,” because it has always been true.

-

I first became aware of my innate survival drive in elementary school: When I was eight years old, a helicopter careened against the window of my third-grade classroom, sending a cloud of fire and flotsam into our desks as the students rehearsed lines for the school play.

The aircraft fell to the ground killing the crew on board, and its wayward propeller sliced through the room, taking the lives of three kids and our teacher. The attending scraps of fiery metal injured seven more of my classmates. One child suffered full-body burns. Another lost part of their arm. I was spared completely. I’d just returned from a trip to the bathroom and had only one foot in the door when the booming sound of the helicopter smacking against our elementary school ripped through my eardrums. Instinct seized my muscles and I ran, without thinking, leaving them all behind. All I could think of was escape.

My initial attempt to leave the school was thwarted. The first door I tried opened directly onto the smoldering wrecking of the crash, and black smoke got in my lungs so thick that I couldn’t breathe. Undeterred, I shut that door and ran again, breathless until I found another exit and tumbled out of it into the outdoors at top speed.

Finally free from the building, gasping to get air into my lungs, I looked around, expecting to see orderly groups of classmates, single-file lines, and adults telling us what to do—but all I saw was chaos. The protocols of the grown-up world hadn’t helped a bit. Piles of wreckage burned in the grass. Sirens blared in the background as teachers tried to corral crying children with little success. The wind from the propeller of a different helicopter, a medivac, blew litter and trash in a furious whirlwind as it landed on the playground, wrappers and paper cups pelting us in the face with great force. It was bedlam.

Standing there, in the epicenter of disaster, I understood for the first time that the world was dangerous and uncertain. The horrible things on the news, the bad things that I’d always thought happened to other people, I came to know suddenly that they can happen to me too—at any time. Nobody was safe. And the idea of an ordered universe was a lie. It was a revelation: There was no coherent future waiting for me, there would not come a time when the world would make sense. I saw it clearly—that we exist in a baseline state of mayhem and the rules we’re told to follow, and the expectations we’re asked to live up to, are just illusions, superimposed over the disarray. You couldn’t count on systems to save you from horror.

For years after the helicopter crash, I believed you could rely only on yourself if you wanted to stay alive. Part of me still believes it.

Later that day, after we’d all returned indoors, sequestered in the auditorium for a head count as we waited for our parents to pick us up, I saw a despondent mother. She’d been informed by the principal that her kid was one of the children who was missing, not yet accounted for. Sitting nearby, I overheard the conversation, and I watched intently as the mother grappled with the news that her child might not have survived. It was horrible, the way her eyes went hollow and her skin lost its flush; I felt her pain in my guts.

And then, just as this mother began to slump against a chair and slip away into despair, her daughter appeared through a doorway and ran to her, crying, “Mommy, mommy, mommy!” The kid, consumed by instinct like me, had run into a bathroom stall and hid until they were discovered by an administrator.

At that point in my short life, their reunion was the closest thing I’d seen to a miracle: The fast reversal—the mother, sinking into the grim certainty that her child was gone, and then just as quickly the solace of having been wrong, the material comfort of getting to squeeze the person she’d already begun to mourn. It was electric. I think about it often now, fantasizing about how wonderful it would be to give just one person that feeling—that soaring elixir of pure relief. I wonder how the relief might rub off on me; I’m almost certain I’d get some collateral joy, a peripheral emotional reward. And I just know that being able to give someone that gift might redeem my own life, would make all my suffering worth it.

Maybe that’s what nurse Linda felt as she tended to me in that hospital room on the day after my daughter’s birth. As I lay in my gown, blinking up at the good nurse, trying to think of something to say, I was grateful when she shushed me. Knowing it was too much for me to try to speak, she told me not to strain and said, “The hard part’s over. Now, all you have to do is recover.”

I often think of the salve of those words, “the hard part’s over.” There are few sweeter things to hear in the course of a human life. I dream of being able to say them to someone, anyone. But the hard part’s never over anymore. Salma and Adnan are long gone. The danger is unyielding. Pain persists. And everybody that’s left is a survivor like me.

One week, two Aprils ago, the world changed forever. Everything we thought we understood turned upside down. There’s almost nothing I know for certain anymore. But I know this: The cessation of pain is so rare, it must be exalted. And it’s so sweet, it’s worth fighting for.