Otherwise we're not learning, and if we're not learning, why bother? The truth is that a good writer who is willing to work hard enough can set a great story in Nebraska or hell or Neptune or at the bottom of a swimming pool. If you do enough research, and spend enough time thoroughly imagining your fictional world, you can write a story about Finnish washerwomen in 1604, or about a restauranteur in Alabama in 2341. Why couldn't you? How history operates in a story is up to the writer, and it's always paramount (i.e., l think a writer should spend the bulk of her time and sentences) to make that world as convincing and seamless as possible. Com~on wisdom always 路has relevance somewhere, and in this case I think "write what you know" does remain useful on a couple levels. First it's relevant in that if you know something, you probably care about it, and "write what you care about" is probably good advice. For example: If you are a violin maker and you know a 路lot about violin making, you know its language and can speak clearly about scrolls and F holes and fingerboards and bridges and tailpieces. But if you know a Lot about violin making and you care about violin making, too-it turns you on, it puts you in touch with something big, it charges you up, it floods you with feeling and memory-then eventually you can teach yourself to employ the poetry of violin-making (or horse-racing or tree-pruning or windsurfing or Bolivian aquaculture or whatever) in your fiction. Authority can be simulated. Passion can't be. Enthusiasm for a subject, if the fiction is written well, will flow through some mysterious system of subcurrents through the language into the reader and engage her. An engaged, skilled writer should be aole to produce an engaged reader. So if you're passionate about fly-tying or tidal movement or old Corvettes, if you have fun writing about those things, if you're getting some essential thrill out of putting a character in a kite factory, having him fall in love with a kite-designer, then you should be able to involve your reader in the poetry of kites. Then you're writing about what you care about and doing it well. Secondly (though it's not really second, since it's all braided together, each part of story-making seems to touch on all the oth.ers) we're always writing about a human's experience in the world, the experience of getting lost, loving our mothers, eating or not eating, falling in love with someone, seeing new places, getting our hopes crushed, feeling the rain on our shoulders- these are things we know if we've lived and breathed for a couple doien years. In that sense, ultimately, you can't escape writing about what you know. So if it's understood in that sense, "write what you know" is good advice. It's also inevitable, so it's redundant. Did that take me long enough to answer? Good grief. KS: Often, your work features natural phenomena or wonders of science. How do you balance your research into or knowledge of the natural world, Winter- Spring 2009
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