Write What You Know

By Wizard Partner Chis Maddock

From Accidental Magic, The Wizard’s Techiques for Writing Words Worth 1,000 Pictures, Chapter 16.

The ad writer is a blindfolded oddsmaker who begs attention from a man with no ears. Listen to his question: “Of what will I write?” He hears a remembered whisper: Write about what you know. “I know about my client‘s business,” he says. But pen to paper produces ads about the business and not about the customer. “So what do I really know about the customer?” The same thing a poet or painter or novelist knows about his audience: their humanity, failings, and lots of little everyday things that make them smile. “But what does that have to do with the product or service?” Exactly.

“Good writing is true writing. If a man is making a story up it will be true in proportion to the amount of knowledge of life that he has and how conscientious he is; so that when he makes something up it is as it would truly be.”— Ernest Hemingway

Poignant truth punches the listener in the stomach because mental bull shit is more repugnant than the real thing. Unpolluted truth is like smelling salts to Broca’s area of the brain: the careful but silent negotiations for personal space on an elevator; the change you hear in your friend’s voice when he finishes talking to his boss and turns to his beloved.

Cheers, “The Road Not Taken”, Full Metal Jacket, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn aren’t about bars, decisions made in the woods, war, or the Mississippi River. You can find their magic happening right outside your door.

“Doesn’t finding a nugget of truth require a comedian’s vigilance, a movie director’s eye for truth? Doesn’t it require risking something?”

You answer.