Tuesday Musings on Writing

The first cliché in writing:
Write what you know.

But how do you make “what you know” worth reading when what you know is, by all accounts, a fairly pedestrian white middle class existence?

I’m 26 years old. I’m married, to a guy I love very much and even better, like a whole lot. We bought a house with a yard and yes, even a white picket fence. We both work at jobs we like in theory but struggle with in practice. We have loving, if slightly kooky, families who want what’s best for us and have no problems letting us know just what they think that is.

This is not the stuff of literary legend.

Sure, there’s plenty of drama to propel our lives forward. Will our couple ever decide what they’re having for dinner tonight? Will THIS be the weekend that the downstairs bathroom finally is finished? We wait, with bated breath, to see if our hero can locate the missing netbook in the abyss of the last unpacked room! :Cue the dramatic music taking us into the commercial break.:

And I think that’s part of where my lack of focus on my creative work has come from over the last few years. It’s seemed doubtful that I had anything interesting to say.

Thankfully, before I can get too despondent about my lack of tortured artist material, I go to work. I have what some might think is an unusual job: I’m a clinician at a juvenile detention center, doing therapy with adolescent males who are awaiting trial on a variety of offenses, from shoplifting to attempted murder. These are kids from all walks of life, though many of them are exactly the cliché you’ve heard before: poor kids with an ethnic minority background coming from a single parent household, usually with a history of substance abuse and/or involvement with street gangs. But it’s not exactly like living in Stand by Me. For as many kids as I help in a day, I’m pretty sure there’s an equal number who want the white girl to step off and stop bothering them. There’s the struggles that one might expect: engaging parents who are fed up with their kids breaking the law, a legal system that penalizes poor kids more than rich kids (and minority kids more than anyone), the bureaucracy of working for the state. And others one might not (ok, the ones I didn’t when I signed up for this): adjusting to working with mostly men and the woefully stereotypical ego trips that ensue, the relative mountains of paperwork coupled with a reticent fax machine, the feeling of taking one step forward, two steps back when there’s not enough of anything: time, money, staff, hope.

When I contrast what my daily life is like with the kids that I spend a good chunk of my time worrying about, it’s pretty obvious that I’d take my life, domestically docile as it is, a hundred times before I’d want to live theirs. But I have the genuine privilege of hearing their stories, getting to see into a world that I could never be a part of otherwise. Stepping into someone else’s shoes, if only for a few minutes, and attempting to see the world from his perspective, and understand the choices that he’s made, is a daily lesson in minimizing judgment, maximizing patience, and keeping a genuine desire to empathize.

Maybe it doesn’t matter what I, as myself, would have to say. Being primarily a poet and living in the age of the memoir (think: The Glass Castle, Running with Scissors, even A Thousand Little Pieces, tenuous though the writer's concept of reality actually was), it's easy to slip into the trap of needing to write from the perspective of ME, from inside my own admittedly narrow experience. But why? In my professional life, my job is empathize, understand and advocate. The ethos of social work has always been giving a voice to the voiceless (which is, of course, another cliche. But when you look at the history of the profession, it's also accurate!). And, at it's bedrock, that’s what writers do. They take the perspective of a character, someone who is all at once completely unique and still (hopefully at least), representative of some part of the reader that they can connect with. They let you see into someone else’s world you wouldn’t be part of otherwise.

So maybe it’s time to get over myself and just write, and see what happens.