Write What You Know, by Thalia Chaltas

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Writing "what you know" is simplest, truest, because hey, it's somewhat about you, right? And who knows you best?  But it becomes more difficult when your "what you know" is a not-so-pleasant past.

I wrote this novel based on my own childhood with a dysfunctional family from all angles.  The beginning poems of Because I Am Furniture are for the most part taken directly from my own history, true experiences.  In the first months of writing, when I read these poems out loud at a Critiquenic, the sheer visceral ick of that childhood flooded through and my voice trembled.

As I continued writing, however, the fifteen years or so of what was my real history had to be condensed and gathered as a novel. Many have asked me how much of the book is "true."  I tell them that situations and conversations are true, maybe up to 50% of the book, but everything has been altered, and therefore much more than 50% of the book is fiction.  An actual situation from my childhood might have been presented with a different character, a trait diminished, words given to someone new, ages altered (my real brother and sister were finished with high school years before I even got there, for instance.)  I had to show cohesion, not just put my true jumbled life on the page;  the actions, words, thoughts need to propel the story.

I can tell I have succeeded with this when a total stranger tells me how they feel about Because I Am Furniture;  they talk with their hands, clutching the space in front of their chests to show the grip the words have, how solidly they take in Anke's story.

People I know have a harder time believing in the fiction, so to speak. I felt similar pain and anger in childhood, but Anke is not me. A friend looking back at our childhood together, now knowing what I went through at home, may have a hard time believing that.  I hear many questions that show the book is not being read as fiction.

"Who was this person?"  (I made her up.) 

"I don't remember that happening."  (It didn't.) 

"Was your mother really that distant and dismissive of you?"  (Absolutely not - but the good mother she was would have lessened the novel as I was writing it.)

When a friend's past is part of mine, they naturally read the novel looking for clues of reality.  And so for the friends and family of a writer, the personal nature of writing "what you know" can skew their perception and make the novel a different experience for them than it is for a stranger. 

In the end, I did write what I know.  And much, much more than that.

Thalia Chaltas, Because I Am Furniture, Viking Children's, Penguin Books