Writing What You Know

The challenges of Writing What You Know

I’ve just started volunteering at the Zetland Lifeboat Museum. It’s the museum where there are pictures of my father, uncles, and cousins. My grandfather’s hat and log book are there. I can see his handwriting though I never met him. I know the stories and I don’t know the stories. The magical thing about writing what you know is that you reach the edges of what you think you know and then there’s this cliff edge of memory and story that you have to leap beyond into possibility. This is when research and imagination need to collide. Volunteering at this museum where my family stories intertwine with the story of the lifeboat, other family’s, and place, the museum looks out over the dangerous North Sea – here is the edge of my knowing and the beginning of the questions. What happens next is the stories.

As well as writing what we know, and challenging those assumptions, I think now more than ever we have to question the responsibility of the writer to the communities they write about. Is it enough to just take the information? Where is the reciprocity that is at the heart of oral storytelling. ‘I’ll give you my tale if you give me yours?” What happens to the idea of an author – that single voice, that single version – when we are writing about history and what we know – when many voices went into making the stories? How do we make space and acknowledge those storytellers? How to we make this a give and take? As I try to answer these questions as I begin to learn the stories of my family, of Redcar, of the Lifeboat and the way the amazing folk at the museum tell these tales, I try to make myself useful – volunteering, washing up, greeting the public, learning the stories before they’re lost.