Write what you know
And learn what you don't
Hi, I’m Kate. Ask an Author is a reader-supported newsletter providing advice and support for authors at all stages of writing, publishing, and hand-wringing. If you know someone this applies to, you can forward them this email and encourage them to sign up. Have a question? Fill out this form and I’ll answer it in a future response.
News!
My debut novel Greenwich will be out in July! Thanks to everyone who entered the Goodreads giveaway, added it to your TBR piles, and has so generously preordered to give yourself a summer reading present!
“Care and Feeding” is out in The Rumpus
“Good Dead Girls,” is out in No Tokens
Dear Kate,
What knowledge and history do you have with Greenwich that you would set your book there?
- Sean McVeigh
Dear Sean,
I was raised in Massachusetts and live in New York. In general, I’m drawn to topics related to New England, class, geography, power dynamics, festering secrets, guilt, and forgiveness—the ways that people hurt each other and yet still come back (sometimes?) with the capacity to try again. All my characters, when I think about it, feel both a part of something and an outsider to it. I’m working on other long-simmering manuscripts and I can see these same themes recurring, whether the book is set in Connecticut, New Hampshire, Brooklyn, etc. It’s an interesting question to consider what personal connection to and history with a place an author needs to have in order to set a book there, and what degree of connection is sufficient. Novels are about a lot of things—places, ideas, characters, situations. What credentials does an author need to show in order to explore those places, ideas, characters, and situations in their writing?
Many people fictionalize aspects of their lives in their books (Alexander Chee’s How to Write An Autobiographical Novel is an incredible exploration of this phenomenon), but that wasn’t what interested me when I started writing Greenwich. I knew early on in conceptualizing the novel where it would be set; when I considered other locations, I kept coming back to Greenwich as the right place for this story to unfold. In the 1990s, when the book begins, financial firms and hedge funds were leaving Manhattan and setting up shop in this part of Connecticut, thanks to its proximity to New York City combined with more space and better tax incentives. So many finance people moved there and made so much $$$ that the area became known as the Gold Coast. Fairfield County now has the densest concentration of wealth in the entire country. Greenwich has three of the wealthiest zip codes in the state; the average listing price for homes is over $2 million. That’s skewed by the biggest houses, which can easily go for over $100 million, but the point is—there’s a lot of money there.
More importantly, people know that there’s a lot of money in Greenwich. I can say the title of the book and people know what I’m talking about. A friend was recently having a conversation with someone who asked, “When’s your friend’s book Nantucket coming out?” She meant Greenwich, but the idea is the same: New England towns with ~vibes~. “Nantucket” would make a good title, too, because it’s a place that conjures something. Catherine Newman’s Sandwich, T Kira Madden’s forthcoming Whidby, Florida by Lauren Groff—using a place name for a title isn’t an original move, but it’s one that I picked for this book because it immediately plants something in the reader’s mind and sets up a sense of conflict. One look at the cover and you know that money, privilege, and comfort can’t insulate this family from everything that’s coming.
The first working title for Greenwich was So Lucky, which is a phrase that gets repeated in the novel to underscore the ways that people with means and privilege will attribute their social, political, and economic standing to literally anything but the structural inequality that systematically benefits them. At one point in the novel Rachel wants to scream at her mother “It’s not luck!” and the reader probably wants to yell it, too. But although I liked the phrase, it didn’t feel like a title, or not the title for this book. Greenwich sums up so much about the novel and the questions it grapples with around class, race, privilege, power, and what money does and doesn’t buy. At the risk of over-explaining my own novel that isn’t even out yet for people to read, Greenwich functions as a metonym in which the name of the place stands in for the world it represents. When I say “Greenwich,” people have an image in mind.
I think it’s that image that you might be objecting to, Sean. (There’s some additional information in the “Anything else I should know” section of the Ask an Author form, and I don’t want to reproduce it here because it’s not part of the question and is something I usually keep between me and the question-asker. At the same time, the context adds a lot to Sean’s question and what I think is an issue with the repeated portrayal in the public imagination of Greenwich as a place where only wealthy people live.) Greenwich is a town with a tremendous about of wealth—that’s indisputable. But that doesn’t mean everyone who lives there is the same class, or feels their class pressure in the same way.
Even as “Greenwich” conjures something in the reader’s mind, the book doesn’t leave that image uncomplicated or unexplored. One of the things I was interested in writing about is how this family lives in such a small bubble, insular to the point of becoming claustrophobic. The limitations of their lives and perspectives have dire consequences—for themselves, for anyone outside this bubble who has the misfortune of crossing their path, and for (if I can be grandiose for a moment) society at large. The narrator, Rachel, doesn’t know a lot of things, but she definitely picks up on the fact that not everyone in this town lives like her aunt and uncle do. I recently watched “The Perfect Couple” on Netflix and I thought it did a good job of exploring this tension, too—how Nantucket, where the story is set, has incredibly lavish second homes for some seriously wealthy (and obnoxious) people, but there are also people who live there, who lead regular lives, and who don’t just exist to provide a playground for the superrich.
A novel is a slice of life with insights into the motivations and outcomes of a specific set of characters (who are made up) in a specific set of situations (which are also made up). There are, I think, some universal truths and lessons and insights and ideas that come from reading about these imaginary scenarios. Why else do we read fiction at all? But a novel isn’t a definitive account of a place or its people. I don’t think any piece of writing can do that. Nor is writing about one group of people an assertion that those are the only people who exist in the story or in the world at large. Someone from a place is going to have their specific viewpoint or account based on their own individual experiences—no one can speak for the whole. What would that even look like? Who could write the definitive account of life in Greenwich, or anywhere else? Even when writing about something the author is really close to, like a hometown or a personal experience, a novelist has to take a big step back and think not about “how did this happen to me?” but “how is this unfolding in the book?”
To broaden this out from my own experience writing Greenwich: the adage to “write what you know” doesn’t mean “write about yourself and your own personal autobiography.” It means that when writing fiction, you can take as kernels or starting points the things that feel familiar, poignant, pressing, and important to you, and use that as the basis for your storytelling. You can write what you know and set it on the Planet Zukon. You can write what you know but consider it from a different perspective. You can write what you know but it becomes so transformed through the lens of fiction that no one would recognize you in its pages. You can write what doesn’t feel like you, and in that process, make discoveries about yourself and your values and beliefs that you hadn’t articulated before you started writing them down.
To be clear, I’m not saying every writer should go off and write about every subject matter, case closed. It matters how the writer goes about doing this, and what we’re talking about when we try to write outside our own experiences. There are stories that are not mine to tell. There are very real issues of appropriation, especially when white authors try to write from the point of view of other races and nine times out of ten totally mangle the job. That in some contexts I’m not going to write about things outside my life experience doesn’t mean that I can only write about my own experiences in all contexts. I don’t think setting a book in Connecticut is an appropriation of the lives of those who grew up or live in the state. I feel okay about punching up and critiquing the structures that prop up the world of this novel, and the individuals who perpetuate those structures in order to serve their own gain. Whether or not I’ve done the subject matter justice is something you’ll have to decide when the book comes out, along with how much my personal history influences your opinion.
A lot of books out there don’t feel like they accurately capture my own life experiences. Sometimes that means I feel like they’ve gotten it “wrong.” But there’s an endless variety of experiences and perspectives out there. If something is different from how I’d write it, that might mean that the author has something different to say than what concerns me. Sometimes I pick up a book to see someone reflect back an experience close to my own. Sometimes I pick one up for the opposite reason, or am happily surprised to find an unexpected perspective on things that are new to me or things I thought I knew. Greenwich is in conversation with other novels that I like—and frankly with some thatI really, really didn’t, which is part of what prompted me to get writing. If you don’t see on shelves the books you’d wish were out there, it’s all the more incentive to write your own!
Keep going,
Kate