It's All About Who You Know

A blank page lies before me, and it is immense and it is limitless. It mocks my deficiency. I could do anything with this page: crease it carefully into intricate origami representations of pop culture icons; draft a letter to my friend who often sends and seldom receives; prepare a treatise on the merits of cold cuts; expand the ninety-five theses to an even hundred; banish it to the wastebasket, there to serve a sentence of slow decay in exile.

They say, "Write what you know," but I suspect that they don't. They mean, of course, "Write who you know." If you wrote about a blender you would not write about the blender that sat atop the counter and plugged into the wall and mixed your smoothies when you depressed a button. No, you would have to write the Blender That Defied a Nation, and your blender would journey and triumph. Your blender would have personality and goals, which brings us back to "Write who you know."

I know a beautiful woman sodden with insecurity. She leaves pools and puddles of it in her wake, and those who shake her hand soon reach for a towel. I cannot write about her because I don't want her to know that I think her soggy.

The trouble with the Who You Know methodology is that as soon as you write about the people you know, you will no longer know any people. Many, I believe, would be flattered to find themselves the protagonists of adventure stories, but few would read their flaws with tolerance. A flawless character is not a character, or perhaps a poor character. No, he must err. And what of villains? If the protagonist is to overcome, then someone's malevolence must be inked into permanence.

I learned just two days ago that two of my favorite personalities in all of literature, East of Eden's Samuel Hamilton and Lee, were actually John Steinbeck's grandfather and family cook, respectively. He didn't even bother to change their names. John Steinbeck, perhaps the greatest American author, crafted these real people into compelling characters, and if the originals lived to see themselves fictionalized, perhaps they were proud. Heaven help the woman who was Cathy Trask.

The key difference between Steinbeck and me, setting aside vocabulary, talent, background, time period, gender, and mortality status, is not our willingness to alienate our friends for the sake of literature, but rather our imaginations. He traced his grandfather with faithful fact, but he colored in the dialogue and plot using the resources of his mind. Without prodigious study and effort, I cannot generate original thought and tone in fiction. If I were to write my mom into a story, her character would say what my mom said to me on the phone last Tuesday, not what I imagine to hear from her next week.

I would like to blame my lack of imagination on television and internet and ready-made stories and the ozone layer and Madonna and Pez dispensers, but I suspect I was meted a small portion in the womb. My childhood stuffed animals I named Snowball, Pinky, Honey, and Gorilly. I will let the reader guess their shapes and distinguishing characteristics.

It may be that I was granted a mighty measure of imagination, but I have not cultivated it properly. From her tender years to adulthood, Charlotte Bronte, together with her brother Branwell, created an entire fictional country, complete with political systems, press, high society and low, rulers and usurpers, magnificent deeds and scandal. Charlotte and Branwell wrote histories of their country, and they knew its hundreds of inhabitants. They spent hours each day creating its mythology, and they kept this up for years. The Brontes lived small lives on the moors of a small country, but their vast minds brooded beyond their borders to a world only they could access and experience. Charlotte's expansive imagination and her years spent tending it prepared her to write into existence Mr. Rochester and St. John Rivers and Rosemary Oliver. Jane, of course, she modeled after herself. Charlotte wrote the people she knew, but her imagination supplied their interest.

My blank sheet of paper is no longer blank, but it still mocks. I could fill the remainder with confused thoughts on the nature of my confined mind, perhaps comparing myself to fellow sufferers among my peers or pointing to studies on the shrinking of imagination or researching the oversaturation of media or enumerating news articles on the "instant generation." Alternatively, I could sketch a windowpane over the rest of my page, tape it to the coarse concrete of my office wall, and allow fancy to freely suggest what might exist outside my paper window.

If you'll excuse me, I need to look for a roll of Scotch tape.