How to Unlearn Everything
“Do you have any advice for writing about people who are not like you?” Over the past few years, this question has been a mainstay at literary events. Online, it’s one of those fights with no seeming end. But the question is a Trojan horse, posing as reasonable artistic discourse when, in fact, many writers are not really asking for advice—they are asking if it is okay to find a way to continue as they have. They don’t want an answer; they want permission. So when I get asked this question, I don’t answer with writing advice. I answer with three questions.
Why do you want to write from this character’s point of view?
Our sense of story is formed by the stories we’ve read. But for most of us, the stories we hear are the first stories that teach us. Stories from family. Stories in the news. Stories we’re taught at school. The traditional role of the storyteller is to tell the stories of a community, or stories that have inscribed the values of that community, or both. Much of the shape of an idea for a piece of fiction depends on what you think the word community means and how you experience it at an unconscious level. And if you’re not in community with people like the ones you want to write about, chances are you are on your way to intruding.
Do you read writers from this community currently?
When I go to literary parties at editors’ homes, I experience the shelves upon shelves of white writers like a rebuke. Most of what has survived to us thus far is literature written by white male writers. For the 24 years I’ve been teaching creative writing, the stories I’ve seen have predominantly been about white people or characters that mysteriously don’t have any declared ethnicity or race at all. This is true no matter the number of students of color in the class, and no matter the amount of writing I assign by writers of color, and even, to my surprise, no matter the declared radical politics of the students. People don’t often know their blind spots until they do a simple audit of their bookshelf.
Why do you even want to tell this story?
In general, the beginner fiction that writers produce is what they think a story looks like. Those are often not really stories but ways of performing their relationship to power. There’s an uncertain promise in telling stories that reaffirm the status quo—they let the storyteller feel connected to the dominant culture. The idea of this question, especially, is to get the questioner to see that perhaps they didn’t want to write a story. That what they were asking for instead was permission to engage in an exercise in power.
So when I sit down with students, I ask them to think of stories they know but have never read anywhere. Stories they always tell but never write down. That’s what this question is really about. Or could be. If the questioner asked themselves the question more often than they asked other people. Alexander Chee is the author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel and an associate professor of creative writing at Dartmouth.