Today’s Zen teabag fortune:

"Wisdom becomes knowledge when it becomes your personal experience."

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At a writer’s conference a few years back, I met a woman who, Hemingway-esque, believed that you couldn’t possibly write about a thing unless you’d shaken its hand. For example, if there was a bricklayer in her novel, she learned the craft. I forget the other jobs she’d taken, but the list was long and varied.

This met with the overwhelming approval of Pat Carr, a long-time workshop leader, writer and college professor, whose impetus for teaching, it seemed, was to instruct women writers never to write as men, because this does not, in her opinion, produce authentic writing.

I’ve been fighting her for years. I was educated in the “use your imagination” school of writing. Yes, Hemingway wrote lousy women characters, but how else could Arthur Golden have written so effectively as a geisha, or even more fantastically, how would science fiction and fantasy ever get created if we couldn’t cross a line here and there? I’ve met a lot of odd ducks in my writing “career” (and I use both terms with the greatest of affection), and I’ve yet to see a Martian or a Cyborg among them.

I’ve thrown every argument in the book at her – my male characters judged authentic by other authentic males, etc. – but it doesn’t wash. If I were to write according to her dictates, which are not only that women should not write as men but should also not write about ages, races, and ethnicities you have never been, then I could only write in the point of view of a white, left-handed female Unitarian agnostic Jew up to and including the age of 44.

Which is too damned restrictive for comfort, if you ask me.

Yes, I wouldn’t dare write as a black woman. Nor would I feel comfortable writing from the POV of a woman with children.

But writing based on actual experiences I have had? Yes, and especially from living through the past year, I can get behind that.

If I was not familiar with a place, or a character’s profession, or whatnot, I used to just write the thing based on what flowered out of my brain, and then do the research on the rewrite. And that worked out fairly well for me, or at least that’s what I told myself. It seemed that I’d get it about 80% right, then go back and pick up the other 20.

But I’ve seen a little more of life lately. People used to tell me, with each new shovelful landing on my shit pile, that one day all this suffering will make me a better writer. While this wasn’t what I wanted to hear at the time, I think in the long run it’s true. I’ve been given the chance to experienced human fallibility and frailty in a deeper and more compassionate way. The novel that reflects this is still percolating, but I’m already finding (and I hope I can express it well enough) that these formerly flat characters are gaining new depth.

I’ve also realized that if I go back to edit the previous ones, many things have to be changed, just for the practical things I’ve been learning. The ins and outs of HMOs. What separates a good specialist from a bad specialist. The effects and side effects of more prescription drugs than any human being should have to experience in a lifetime.

Hey, if nothing else, I could probably write a pretty good medical thriller. From a woman’s point of view, of course.

Just so I can tell Pat I let her win. This time.