Write what you know. The advice is old, and the complaint against it is older: one is out of ideas—writer’s block and all.
Writer’s block is not a writing problem or an idea problem.
What you know is what you accumulate, whether or not you know at the time what it is for or when you will use it. Emily Dickinson accumulated a universe of ideas while rarely leaving her house in Amherst.
Ideas run out for one of two reasons: too little experience, or too little attention.
Firsthand
In 1956, a horse called Devon Loch, owned by the Queen Mother and ridden by Dick Francis, collapsed yards from the finish of the Grand National, with the race won. No one has ever established why. Francis retired the next year and wrote forty-odd novels about racing, and what readers say about them, still, is that they are true. Not accurate. True. He had been on the horse.
Somerset Maugham worked for British intelligence in Switzerland and then in Russia, and the Ashenden stories came out of it, flat and accurate, including the boredom. He spent the next thirty years on ships to the Far East and put what he saw into fiction more or less as he found it.
Graham Greene served with British intelligence in Sierra Leone, took assignments in Vietnam, drank in Havana, and each place got its novel.
Le Carré, of course.
Evelyn Waugh went to Abyssinia for a coronation in 1930 and wrote it up as Remote People. He used the journey again in Black Mischief. Five years later, he went back as a war correspondent and did it again: the factual book was Waugh in Abyssinia; the novel was Scoop.
Isak Dinesen had a farm in Africa. Beryl Markham flew the plane. Edith Wharton wrote Italian Villas and Their Gardens, a serious work of architectural study, before Italian villas appeared again and again in her fiction. Fleming had been in naval intelligence and gave Bond his brand of cigarettes and his breakfast, down to the eggs from French Marans hens, Tiptree Little Scarlet strawberry jam, and Cooper’s marmalade, thick, dark, and bitter.
These writers lived, then they knew things, then they wrote. The order matters.
Knowledge personally stalked and dragged home has a different texture from knowledge acquired at a desk. The traveler who ventures out for photographs is consuming. The traveler who goes to pay attention is building. She creates a private compendium of the world—hers—assembled from what she notices, joined to what was already there. That is the point of adventure.
The compendium becomes the source you write from, and it is why what you write is filled with details no one would think to invent: that the skybridge between the Petronas Towers moves under your feet, and that everyone on it pretends it doesn’t; that two porters outside Le Bristol, in the same uniform at the same hour, are both named Laurent, and it is the only thing about them that matches; that a latte at Café Antonia arrives in Raynaud’s Histoire Naturelle porcelain, and a little orange butterfly is about to alight on the rim.
You notice how a cabin steward on the Orient Express lifts a heavy case from a brass luggage rack far above both your heads. How unexpectedly small the Arnolfini Portrait is, and that the mirror at the back of the room, with the whole Passion painted round its rim, is the size of a saucer.
Aline Griffith, later Countess of Romanones, spent the war in Madrid for the OSS. The Ritz, the Balenciaga fittings, the countess at the next table whom she was certain was working for Berlin, escapades with the Duchess of Windsor. The files, where they exist, are thin, of course, but she did not defend her experiences. She did not need to. She was there, and that is evident. She said she would die with her secrets, and did. Although having been there is not the same as being provable, it is what makes you believable. Mount Rainier described from photographs rather than on foot has the right details in the right order, and no one believes a word.
The Price
There are two costs. The first is time: the years in public service, in the saddle, on the ship, on station in Freetown, are years spent not writing. Fleming wrote Casino Royale at forty-four. Francis was forty-one when Dead Cert appeared. Maugham was fifty-four when he got around to Ashenden. Wharton published her first novel at forty and The House of Mirth at forty-three. Markham was forty. Dinesen was forty-eight for Seven Gothic Tales and fifty-two for Out of Africa. Romanones was sixty-four. They were not late. They were busy.
The second cost is the one Waugh and Maugham understood. You have to give the life away. The trip stops being yours. The farm stops being yours alone. Dinesen lost hers and then wrote, “I had a farm in Africa,” and the authority of the sentence is entirely in the past tense. The melancholy underneath everything she wrote afterward comes from never having entirely got over it.
Write what you know, then. What you know is what you have accumulated from paying attention. When there is nothing to write, it is not the writing that has run out.