When you decide to become a writer, the first piece of advice you come across is, “Write what you know”. That explains why every debut author you speak to purses their lips and fights back a momentary pang of embarrassment when they explain that their novel is very close to their experience, but they swear it’s fiction – true events are really just what inspired a broader narrative.
The next thing you hear is an Anne Lamott quote, parroted endlessly across Pinterest boards and abandoned Tumblr journals all over the internet: “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”
Taylor Swift and Joe Alwyn at the 2020 Golden Globes.Credit: Getty Images
You take it as permission and hold it close as you sit down in front of a blank page and change the name of your real-life antagonist ever so slightly, just enough for plausible deniability for you; just enough that when they see your name on a book jacket in some airport bookstore and thumb through the pages, they’ll recognise their character and feel sick with the shame of being perceived in print. That’s how the fantasy goes, anyway.
This echoes through other media, too. When news broke that Taylor Swift had broken up with her boyfriend of nearly seven years, the first thought heard around the world was “Oh, her next album is going to slap.”
Any Swiftie worth their salt can identify which song belongs to which break-up; can pull together the threads and detours of Taylor’s relationships based on lyrical references to accessories worn in date-stamped paparazzi pictures. It becomes a game: who can snuffle out the clues behind track five the fastest? This is Taylor Swift’s world, and we’re just the crazed detectives living in it, pinning red twine from plot point to plot point, working out the story beneath the story. All because Taylor does what we all do: she wraps her wounds in fiction and trades them for our entertainment.
Illustration by Robin CowcherCredit:
Heartburn, one of Nora Ephron’s most celebrated texts, is a thinly disguised account of her divorce from Carl Bernstein. We finally, finally know that Carly Simon wrote You’re So Vain about Warren Beatty. Sofia Coppola’s film Lost in Translation and Her by Spike Jonze are two films that tell two sides of the same divorce. You can’t flip on your television or scroll through Spotify without running into someone’s attempt to turn their side of the story into truth.
You’re never really safe with a writer in your orbit. Even when they aren’t writing about you, they’re watching, listening, learning. Every experience, interaction, gesture is logged for future use. You may never be a character in their story, but your likeness might not escape unscathed.
Clockwise from top left: Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, starring Scarlett Johansson (top right) was one side of a divorce story later told by Spike Jonze in Her, starring Joaquin Phoenix (below left). Credit:
Stories are a great analyser. Whether you’re writing a story, a screenplay or a song, getting your feelings out onto a page is cathartic, and once it’s all there in print, you find that you see it in a different light. Did it really happen that way? Was I really blameless? The look on someone’s face when you said goodbye for the last time: how did it feel? Where did I feel it in my body? How do I feel about it now? To you, your favourite song is something fun to bop along to. To the person behind it, it’s a therapy session. They need to write about their experience. They need their experiences to write.
As I dived into the structure of my third novel, I hit a wall. I write contemporary romance novels, which means I have to plunder my extensive back catalogue of disaster dates and catastrophic heartbreaks and build a world, plot and character around them. Which break-up do I rewrite next? What trauma have I not yet mined for entertainment, for profit?
Sometimes, these days, I catch myself doing things for the source material. Sometimes I catch myself worrying that the day I run out of new experiences is the day my writing career ends. As I make questionable choices, text people I shouldn’t, ignore my therapist’s advice, get myself into a load of trouble and hug my knees as I rock back and forth in my manic misery, repeating the inane excuse – “For the story! For the story! For the story!” I wonder if Taylor Swift does it too.
Hey, it’s all content. Maybe my fourth book will be about a frantic author who shreds her life and then tries to glue it all back together in a desperate effort to find something to fill a book with. You’ve got to write what you know.
Genevieve Novak’s second novel, Crushing, is out now.
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2023-04-25 19:30:00Z
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