rolanni | On Writing What You Know OR How David Byrne Made Me a Writer

One of the most basic pieces of writing advice -- so basic that it's handed out wholesale to roomfuls of high school English classes like day-old toll house cookies -- is write what you know.

Whether or not this is good advice is open to debate. Me, I tend to write what my characters know, since it's all about them; a philosophy that has led me, a math-phobe terrified of airplanes, to write not only the story of a woman who is a mathematician, but to invent an entire clan of pilots to party with. However, it took years and several books to arrive at this philosophy. When

kinzel and I sat down to write our first book, I had precious little in the way of any philosophy at all.

I did, however, have the wisdom of the ages.

Write what you know.

Sad to say, I knew precious little back in 1984. My head was crammed to cracking with the words, characters and notions of the approximately quizzilion stories I'd read to that point, the lyrics to 'way too many rock 'n roll songs, and the minutiae (of which there is a surprisingly great deal) of being an executive secretary; I had made up lots and lots of stories that had never been written down, and in so doing created, without really understanding it, the characters who would become Val Con and Miri -- but I didn't actually know anything.

However, all was not lost.

I did have a firm grounding in espionage, as depicted in such weekly documentary series as Secret Agent, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Mission Impossible, The Prisoner, Get Smart, The Avengers, I Spy, The Wild, Wild West, The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. (*shudder*), and, of course, Danger Mouse. In addition,

kinzel had previously addicted me to the works of Georgette Heyer.

Also, I was deeply in love with Talking Heads.

This was the knowledge base I brought to writing our first novel.

I used to tell people that Agent of Change was just an expansion of "Life During Wartime," with a side of "Once in a Lifetime." In a way, that's accurate, and in another (as these things typically go), it's not. Certainly there are similarities in plot and tempo between Agent and "Wartime," but Agent is more than an expansion of the song. It's also something...other...than a facsimile sixties television spy show, though it surely takes some of its tone from John Steed, and a good deal of its emphasis on the bonding of partners from Jim West and Artemis Gordon, not to say Solo and Kuryakin.

In the end, though, despite its relatives and influences, Agent is...only itself. Which is the funny thing about writing what you know (yes, Virginia, there is a point to all of this). By the time you've used everything you know to set down this series of events that befell these characters -- you've got something that's very much like something you've never seen before.