You’ll Always Write What You Know

Many people who read my novel, A FALSE DAWN, have asked me, “Why did you pick this character and this topic: A woman in the 1740s? Living in the middle of a war you, Jeff, never lived through?” Much as readers might enjoy the book, they often can’t help asking: Isn’t a novelist supposed to write about what he knows?

I asked myself the same question when I started writing this novel. The answer, I found, is that I did indeed write about what I know. The specifics of the story – characters, settings – were unfamiliar to me, at least at first. But the world I’ve created around these characters is eerily similar to the world I grew up in, with its good qualities and bad ones. The way people treated each other, talk (or don’t talk) to each other, the effort you have to make to get any attention from others. Louise’s world is all very familiar from my own life.

Unless you consciously try to stay away from what you know, I think a novelist cannot help recreating the world he or she grew up in. Four years after my novel was published, I see the world I grew up in, as a child, as a young adult, as a husband of 30 years, reflected in astonishing clarity in the pages of my novel.

I’ll have more to say about this in future posts. But no matter how different or exotic the world of A FALSE DAWN might appear, it’s very much like the world I know.