Writing What You Know

This is probably the third time in recent weeks that I've commented on something written by Tribune columnist Mary Billitier.  It's probably really unfair on my part, partially because her columns have been much less maudlin recently and she deserves credit for that.  It's also probably unfair as I tend to pick on the entire Casper Star Tribune every time I do that, and by recent observation their columnists aren't as bad as I have tended to portray them really. 

Here I'll give Billitier a little credit while, at the same time, criticize the publishing (and film) industry.  In today's Billitier CST article, Billitier notes that she submitted (resubmitted?) an old novel she had written to her publisher. She, as she recently related, is in her 40s, but the novel was written when she was in her early 30s, and features people in their 20s.

Now, I'm not privy to the rejection letter she received, but apparently her publisher gave the novel to some 20 year old employees who did not find it really credible, and therefore they gave her a re-write assignment, which I'll address in a moment.  But first I'd note that the entire idea that a person must be a certain age in order to portray it is bull. Rather, a person must be observant as to that age in order to portray it. As even Billitier noted, J. K. Rawlings hugely successful series of books was written to a youngish audience which she was far removed from. But, to give another more significant example, consider that Tolstoy was in his 20s when he started writing War and Peace, the greatest novel ever written.  The books starts out with observations of 20 year olds and teenagers, more particularly early teenage girls.  Tolstoy was never a teenage girl.  And the book goes through decades to where the characters are in their late middle age when it wraps up, with some elderly characters portrayed all along. It's often been noted how dead on he was in portraying people in context, and it sure wasn't because he was the ages of the people he was writing about at the time.  So here I think Billitier wasn't off the mark in feeling a bit wounded, even though she took the criticism to heart.  Here, for once, I don't think she should ahve.

Be that as it may, the next part of the column really bugs me.  Her publisher indicated that it wanted the re-write to feature a 40 year old woman who has to go back and patch up a rift in her ranch family.

What? 

If Billitier can't be expected to write accurately about the insights of 20s somethings, while would some dim bulb publisher seriously expect her to be able to write bumpkis about anything to do with a ranch family? Billitier is a Californian, not a Wyomingite, and the mere fact of her being transplanted here would no more guarantee that she has an insight into ranching than noting that my wife has a houseplant would make me an expert on horticulture.  I'm not criticizing Billitier at all on this, and to her credit, once again, she didn't indicate that she did know anything about this topic, and rather that she felt a bit humbled by the whole experience.  All the more so as she's apparently teaching a class on novel writing right now.

What this shows is how amazingly ignorant publishers are, at least as to certain formulas.  I noted on my Today In Wyoming's History blog recently that it seemed to be the case that there are a fair number of local authors who we could hope would do better, although some are, while we have always had some people who write about the West, or Wyoming, whose closeness to it we might question. This is not to say that a person must have grown up here, or even live her, to write about here. But why on earth would a publisher assume that mere residence here would mean that a writer would know anything about ranching?  It's absurd.  Most Wyomingites, of course, aren't ranchers at that, and in order to know anything about ranching, you pretty much have to ranch or really deeply immerse yourself in it.  I frankly think you'd have to do it. That makes me also suspect, fwiw, that this is equally true about any novel involving farming, livestock, riding horses, or the military.  If you haven't experienced that to some degree, you aren't going to get it quite right, I suspect.  Having said that, there are quite a few novels on these topics that are excellent, and I don't know if the writers had experienced those things or not.  I do know that merely living in an area does not make a person an expert on that areas culture or occupations.  I once spent a month in South Korea, for example, but that doesn't make me an expert on Gangnam Style.

This does explain why nearly every recent televised portray of Wyoming I've seen, however, is ubersappy.  Hollywood appears to seriously believe that Wyoming looks like the area just outside of Los Angeles, and that every single Wyomingite is a small rancher.  It also seems to believe that it is actually possible for a person to just go buy a ranch.   Hardly a reality.  And Hollywood also seems to really like the ranch girl goes home to patch up big crisis genera, of which there are a whole host of recent examples.

Well, I don't wish Billitier ill on this.  I actually sympathize with her.  She is probably legitimately an expert on a topic that's far more common than her publishers want her to write on, given her domestic travails,and it's too bad they want her to write a Horse Opera when she would have no apparent background, that I can see, to write it.