Sometimes You Can’t Just “Write What You Know”

And that’s okay

Once, when I was working at an advertising agency in the mid-1990s, my boss was invited by a leading magazine to contribute an article on the Internet (which at the time was referred to by the now obsolete term, the “information superhighway”).

Hands full trying to rake in new clients, he turned to me to lend him a hand with what was clearly a low priority initiative. He asked me to write the article. Oh, and if I wanted to put my name on it, by all means do so, he said.

So I did a lot of research, which amounted to reading magazines like The Economistand Fortune while standing at the magazine rack in the book store (I was saving my meager ad agency salary so I could make my escape for business school).

Back at the office, I tapped out my analysis of how the Internet was “changing the paradigm for marketing and advertising through enabling interactivity”, and other similarly profound insights I had gleaned from my research.

I then had my masterpiece translated into Chinese and submitted it to the editor. They published it, under my Chinese name, and I basked in the glow of my first fifteen minutes of fame.

But there was just one catch:

I had never actually used the Internet before. Not even once.

It was 1995 and few companies were connected to the Internet. The Taiwan branch of my agency certainly wasn’t. We didn’t even have email access (though our clients did, I recall).

If I learned anything from this experience, it was that writing is a process of exploration. With just about any piece of writing we produce, we venture cautiously and gradually into unknown territory. We cross the river while feeling the stones, as the Chinese proverb goes.

Writing, as Stephen King says in his memoir On Writing, is like digging for fossils. The words you seek are there already, buried beneath the layers of sediment that have gathered over millions of years. You just have to stick your metaphorical shovel in the ground and dig.

But tools and processes can only get you so far. Having the courage to embark on the journey; the persistence to keep digging until you find what you’re seeking (your story); and the confidence to hit “publish” and expose your work to the world are what define the writer.

Writers are adventurers. Pioneers staking a claim to their corner of the universe, even if it doesn’t belong to them.

And even if they’ve never been there before.

Thanks for reading. Read more of my writing, and be the first to hear about a new project I’m working on by signing up on my blog here.

Image: Angie Garrett / Flickr