Writing What You Know

Like Will Rollins in Cheechako, I moved early to Nenana, Alaska from Cambridge, Massachusetts. You can find Nenana near Fairbanks on the map, near dead center in the state.

I was just seven when we moved, eight in the photo above. Yes, that's me, smiling, with our dog Chena, the one who managed to get himself stranded on the ice during breakup. No, I didn't actually go out there and get him. And I never forgot the drama of that moment, years later turning it into one of my first sales to Cricket Magazine and then into the first Cheechako chapter.

As a former Jr. High English teacher and sometimes writing coach, I have often advised writers to "write what you know." I remember an eighth grader wailing "but I don't know what I know."

Or as Yogi Berra might have said, "I didn't know all the things I knew."

And like Berra, we would be right.

I can't rattle off many facts about the interior of Alaska, but I know how snow crunches– how it sounds and feels underfoot when the temperature rises. I know the softness and surprise warmth on my face of the midwinter chinook wind that drives the temperature up maybe thirty degrees in an hour, and when it goes leaves me longing for spring.

I know the sounds of trees cracking in the bitter cold, the winter wolf howl that raises hairs on the back of my neck, and the first soft scent of cottonwood trees at just about breakup time.

And it's that knowing that lets us write authentically. The experiential knowing that informs and enriches our storyteller voice. That inspires us through to our successful conclusions.

Sometimes, unexpectedly, we sit down to discover we do know a whole bunch of the things we know. See ... right there on the page.