Use what you know to get started

My name is Andrew Boryga, and this post is the beginning of a bi-weekly column I’ll be writing entitled “From One Young Writer to Another.” The purpose of my column is to give a different perspective on the literary world. Through my own experiences as a young writer I want to provide some advice for people my age, or at the least, examples of what not to do.

I am a freshman English major at Cornell University. I first became interested in literature in middle school, and since my sophomore year of high school, the only thing I’ve ever wanted to be is a writer. The majority of my writing thus far has been journalistic. I have been writing fiction for less than a year. In most cases my inexperience would be a limiting factor, but on this site it’s a gift.

So if there is any writing issue you’d like to see tackled from a young person’s perspective, whether or not you’re a young writer yourself, let me know by emailing me at andrew@litdrift.com.

I began my first real short story in November. Billy was my first protagonist.

He lived in a small Midwestern town and worked a gas station. He was a sophomore at a decent college but didn’t like it much. He wanted out of his life.

A man pulled into his station one day driving a car covered in bumper stickers, offering Billy the ride of a lifetime. “Come watch the lines on the road with me,” said the ragged old man.

This whole story had been mapped out: the plot –– everything. But after four pages, I had nothing to say. Billy was still in school, getting ready to leave with the traveler and I was preparing to write crazy adventures for the two of them –– crazy adventures I’ve never experienced myself. I’ve never hitchhiked, never bought anything but roundtrip bus tickets and I’ve always known when I was coming home. And so Billy’s story remained four pages long.

During winter break in December, I went home. I enjoyed the food and my old friends. I reminisced. I pulled out my box of old middle school photos. I thought about all the stupid things my friends and I used to do. I thought about my old principal who’d only give late passes to the pretty girls and I thought about the bus driver on the BX 55 who’d yell and holler every time I went through the back entrance.

Then it hit me.

“What the hell am I doing writing about a kid from the Midwest?” I asked myself. I’ve lived in the Bronx for 19 years –– I don’t know jack shit about the Midwest.

So I started writing about what I knew. I wrote about my neighborhood, my school, my crazy friends. Soon I had 22 pages written in the same amount of time it took me to write four about Billy’s Midwest. The words came easily because I was writing about something real to me, something familiar.

The ironic thing about fiction is that true events and true fragments of life inspire it; a childhood, a summer, a conversation, an overheard conversation, something you’ve done, heard done, or whatever. These snippets leave an imprint on your memory and wait in a corner of your brain for you to think of them one day, to realize a story’s there.

As young writers we often try to write outside our experiences and ourselves –– like I did in the Midwest. We want to write a novel about love but haven’t experienced true love yet. We want to write about finding ourselves and haven’t a clue who we are. We want to write about escaping to new places but haven’t been there yet. Et cetera.

That is why we must write about things we know, even if they seem trivial.

Pulitzer Prize winner Junot Diaz was born in Santo Domingo. He lived there for 9 years until he moved to a rough New Jersey neighborhood. His first book, Drown, is a collection of stories all about his experiences in Santo Domingo and New Jersey. According to Diaz, almost all his ideas originate from “a memory…more of an emotional memory than an image or detail.”

Diaz is not alone in drawing ideas from experiences. On the Road came from Jack Kerouac’s adventures with his rowdy friends, Moby Dick came from Herman Melville’s time as a cabin boy, The Things They Carried came from Tim O’Brien’s time at war, and so on. All great novelists write about things they know, and so should we. We can’t forget that our memories and experiences are valuable, and we should never write them off as something lesser than what they are.

No matter if you’re a poor kid from the Bronx, a middle class kid in the suburbs, or a rich kid in the Hamptons, you have a story to tell. So tell it.