Sunday, July 16, 2017
Climbing Walls
S. Lee Manning: Universal advice to writers has always been to write what
you know. What that meant was to write from personal experience – which for me pretty
much would have meant writing novels about middle class Jewish women from
Cincinnati, Ohio – who wanted to be writers but wound up as attorneys and then
worked part time so they could raise their families.
No offense to anyone. I know this life. I’ve lived it. I didn’t
want to write just my life.
I tend to be careful and risk adverse. Yet I like writing
about people who climb walls three stories high to break into a building. Or
who have sit downs with gangsters who might kill them. I like writing about
people different from me. For me, most of the fun of writing is in imagining
situations and people that differ from me and my life.
So writing spy thrillers works as long as I do my homework
and my research – although I did have one agent tell me that she would only
consider spy novels written by CIA agents. (Sigh.)
But what about writing characters whose identities differ
from our own? Is it kosher to write from a male perspective if you’re female?
Or the reverse?
A lot of people, myself included, like to write characters
from a different gender because it helps them get out of their own heads – and
into the head of a character. I find it interesting to try to imagine how a man
would think – how a man would act. I also write from women’s perspectives, and
I’m contemplating a new series with a strong woman protagonist. Still I do like
writing from the perspective of someone different – which Kolya, my current
protagonist, certainly is.
What about writing a character from a different ethnic
background? Is that kosher? There is a debate about that going on right now,
and I’m sticking my foot in it, probably, to even ask the question.
I understand the perspective of underrepresented peoples who
feel that their experience needs to be authentic. But does that preclude
writing outside one’s own box?
A personal story.
When I was a kid, the Holocaust was not that long ago. We
Jews felt it so strongly – we knew survivors – and we knew that but for existing
in a different time and space, we would have been victims. But among all the
stories of death and terror, there was a true story of Jewish heroism and courage.
I was obsessed with the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. I read every novel on the
uprising, and the best, the most moving, novel I read on the uprising was The
Wall, written by John Hersey.
The title, the Wall, referred to the wall around the Warsaw
ghetto, meant to keep Jews in and non-Jews out. Trying to escape over the wall
was punishable by death. Smuggling food
into the ghetto was punishable by death. Jews were crowded into the space, and
the population of the ghetto was thinned out by starvation and disease. But the
Jews didn’t die fast enough, so the German came up with another plan, deporting
the residents of the ghetto for “resettlement” in the East – which was a
euphemism for deporting them to be systematically murdered. As the ghetto was
emptied out, and the Jewish residents sent to Treblinka to be gassed to death,
those who remained obtained guns and made Molotov cocktails. On April 19, 1943,
when the Germans entered the ghetto to gather the surviving Jews to be
murdered, the Jews fought back. They fought against tanks and flame throwers
with handguns and home made bombs. The
Germans didn’t crush the revolt until May 16, at which point any captured
survivors were either sent to the gas chambers or killed on the spot. A handful
of Jewish fighters escaped through the sewers to the forests of Poland.
The Wall is a superb novel - capturing the Jewish experience
as people moved into the ghetto, as they were systematically dehumanized, as
they realized the ultimate planned fate, and as they plotted to fight back.
Hersey was not a Jew.
The fact that he was not a Jew did not in any way diminish
the power or the beauty of that novel. It remains to this day one of the best
novels I have ever read about that particular moment in time.
But he wrote with such sensitivity, such care. Clearly, he
deeply researched Jewish culture and the Jewish religion, as well as the
historical event of the uprising. And that is so important for anyone writing a
character different from one’s own ethnicity – to do so with sensitivity, to
avoid stereotypes, and to research.
So while the question of writing outside one’s own ethnic
box is one that every writer has to answer for himself or herself, I will say
this. I am glad that John Hersey decided to climb that wall from the non-Jewish
side into the Warsaw ghetto. I am the richer for it.
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Interesting article in today's (7/16) Washington Post by Gil Steinlauf, an American rabbi who has been blacklisted by the Israeli Rabbanut, the official religious authority in the Israeli government. "The reason? We can only guess."
ReplyDeleteSteinlauf relates how he was once told, in Israel, by an ultra-Orthodox Jew living there, that the Holocaust should be blamed on the Jews themselves, "because too many Jews weren’t regularly checking the mezuzahs on their doors to make sure they were still kosher!” Strange things happening in Israel.
This is not that strange. The ultra orthodox have always been, shall we say, a little off...
DeleteAs you said, S. Lee, we've all heard about "writing what you know" ....but that would mean we would have no historical thrillers, science fiction, paranormal, Regency romance, or other great stories to read. You are exactly right about the need, though, for an author to do a tremendous amount of research, just as you do for your great novels. Thanks for this very thoughtful post.
ReplyDeleteS. Lee, I'm with you--write what you want to know, not what you actually do know. I've not read THE WALL. Thanks for the recommendation!
ReplyDeleteWhat a wonderful post, S. Lee! I had no idea about John Hersey wasn't Jewish either. What a powerful book, and it puts the lie to the impossibility of writing authentically from others' points of views!
ReplyDelete