I bet you’ve heard this one before: “Write what you know.”
It’s advice – or a diktat – that I’m sure confuses many aspiring writers. Easy enough if it’s a romcom you’re writing and you’ve ridden the rollercoaster of at least one romantic hiccup (who hasn’t?). But what if you want to write a police procedural and haven’t so much as stepped inside a police station, never mind murdered someone? Of course you can carry out extensive research, and you should, but I believe the best thing you can bring to any story is your own truth.
We humans experience the same sorrows and joys in one form or another. Yes, even those who apparently lead a charmed life. Some of us are lucky enough to get through it unscathed apart from the odd minor scrape or bruise to the soul. Others survive unimaginable horrors. Or don’t. And yet we all want the same things – love, inner peace, a sense of fulfilment. For our children, if we have them, to achieve those too and for those we care about to be safe and happy. Simple desires, perhaps, and yet they are often so hard to achieve.
For the past few years, I’ve been writing a series of books set in WW2. I’ve plunged up to my elbows in researching every detail, including the real-life stories of people who were so brave it brought me to tears at times and who lived with every atom of their beings even amid war. I started those books at a time in my life which was so terrifying I thought it might break me. It didn’t and that’s partly due to the courage staring me in the face every day as I wove their stories into my own.
The latest book in my series, If I Can Save One Child, is possibly the closest to my own experience. It’s the story of the escape lines which helped downed airmen and civilians to get out of occupied France, taking them by sea and over the Pyrenees into Spain. The women and men who ran these lines were extraordinary, risking their lives every day to save others, some of whom had to leave behind everything and everyone they’d ever known to get to freedom.
I was painfully aware as I wrote of the echoes of this we see today, with families fleeing war-torn countries, also risking their lives and those of their children to trek across mountains and cross seas to get to safety, never knowing what would happen next. I understood their fear only too well.
When I started this book, I’d just lost everything I had, including the home where I’d fought for seven years to save my daughter’s life. I’m now living hundreds of miles away in a tiny cottage with what I could salvage of our possessions locked away in storage. What’s not locked away are my memories or the emotions I experienced and still do.
I am not for one minute suggesting that I had to flee for my life in the way that my characters did, or as people do every day across the world, although it came close. What I do know is that I brought as much of my own experience as I could to the book, infusing my characters and the story with the desperation and heartbreak that I felt, as well as the fierce love my protagonist, Elisabeth, feels for those she has to save, no matter what.
I also brought the courage I’d learned from those people I came across in my research, the same courage which saw me through the long years it took to save my own child. So yes, in a way I wrote what I knew and that’s how you can do it too. Begin with the shared experience, the touchpoints of commonality that we all have and then dig deeper into your own life to bring that to the page, infusing it into your characters so they sing with real life.
It can leave you raw with remembering. To my mind, that’s a good thing. The more you bring to the surface, the better. I firmly believe that story is our greatest healer. It can touch people in a way that strikes a very deep chord. Story is, after all, our ancient way of communicating and of learning as well as of processing trauma. It’s how our ancestors passed on the myths and tales that reflect love and loss, pain as well as passion, teaching the lessons we all need to learn.
From writing my own stories I have learned to be undaunted in the face of overwhelming danger. To always have faith, no matter what. It doesn’t really matter what you believe in so long as you believe in something…especially yourself. Every story you tell will reflect you in some way whether you like it or not.
If you are brave and tell that story with everything you have, good and bad, it translates into the kind of truth readers can sense, in the same way the ancients did sitting around their campfires. You will then have passed on to them the greatest gift you can give another person – the reassurance that they are not alone. That their hopes and fears are shared by us all. That we are all part of the same story, told over and over, bringing solace and understanding to the human heart.
This was originally published on the excellent site Writing.ie, a superb magazine for writers and readers: https://www.writing.ie/interviews/if-i-can-save-one-child-by-amanda-lees/
