Writing what you know
Written July 03 2025
I haven’t really had a lot of time to write lately. I have been thinking about what I want to write, where I want to take the stories that I’m currently writing, I’ve taken notes and sorted and ordered them in increasingly long lists so that I can just turn all of it into prose once I have the time.
But I’ve also thought a lot about what I want to write. Most of my stories have been pretty inane, I think. By that I mean that they’re pretty shallow when it comes to theme or—God forbid—implication. I know that not everything has to be a sci-fi novel thoroughly exploring some philosophical or social issue. I’ve read Lem, I’ve read Le Guin, I’ve read Butler; I know I’m not as good as them and neither do I want to be. Still, I feel like at best my writing could be described as ‘neat’ or maybe ‘cool’ and that’s it.
The thing is, I wouldn’t know what else to write. ‘Write what you know’ is what people will tell you, but I’ll be honest, my life is pretty boring for the most part. I’m a university student. I spend most of my time sitting in the library or listening to some lecture and most of my free time is taken up spending time with my girlfriend. That is to say, I did have a lot of memorable experiences in the past year or so, but I don’t think that’s anything I’d want to write about. I’ve been fighting with my health insurance provider so that they finally cover some important medical expenses and I’ve regularly had to deal with discrimination, both of which are hard not to think about, hard not to let dominate your life. I don’t feel like I could write about any of that though. I don’t just want to write stories about blasting bigots’ heads off—as fun as that might be in the moment, it would probably get boring pretty quickly. I’ve played around a bit and tried to incorporate some of that into my short stories, but it just felt weird and out of place.
David Lynch has been on my mind lately. I’ve been meaning to rewatch Twin Peaks and some scenes from it keep floating around in my head. In particular, I keep thinking of the scene where Cole tells Denise ‘When you became Denise, I told all of your colleagues, those clown comics, to fix their hearts or die.’ It’s perfect. I’ve talked to a bunch of people about David Lynch’s movies and most of them just seem confused, which is understandable. But at least to me their main theme has always been pretty clearly been about empathy and humanity. The most obvious example, I think, is The Elephant Man, but I think most of his films invite us to empathise with their characters, who are often haunted, hurt, confused, sometimes marginalised. It’s what really draws me to them.
I don’t think I could ever be as good as David Lynch—maybe no one can— but if I can just inject a bit of that empathy, that hopefulness, that strength into my writing, I’d be happy. Until then I just got to keep on writing about lesbians and vampires.