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Write What You Know. Every Guide For The Aspiring Author Advises This. Because I Live In A Long-settled Rural Place, I Know Certain Things. I Know The Feel Of A Newborn Lamb's Damp, Tight-curled Fleece And The Sharp Sound A Well-bucket Chain Makes As It Scrapes On Stone. But More Than These Material Things, I Know The Feelings That Flourish In Small Communities. And I Know Other Kinds Of Emotional Truths That I Believe Apply Across The Centuries.

-Geraldine Brooks

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Write What You Know.

Geraldine Brooks

...

Write What You Know. Every Guide For The Aspiring Author Advises This. Because I Live In A Long-settled Rural Place, I Know Certain Things. I Know The Feel Of A Newborn Lamb's Damp, Tight-curled Fleece And The Sharp Sound A Well-bucket Chain Makes As It Scrapes On Stone. But More Than These Material Things, I Know The Feelings That Flourish In Small Communities. And I Know Other Kinds Of Emotional Truths That I Believe Apply Across The Centuries.

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And So, As Generally Happens, Those Who Have Most Give Least, And Those With Less Somehow Make Shrift To Share.

My Sentences Tend To Be Very Short And Rather Spare. I'm More Your Paragraph Kind Of Gal.

It Is Human Nature To Imagine, To Put Yourself In Another's Shoes. The Past May Be Another Country. But The Only Passport Required Is Empathy.

All The Times, All The Very Many Times, I Had Been Forced To Thwart And Stifle My Own Nature Seemed To Gather Together Then, In That Hot And Dismal Corridor. I Heard A Rushing Sound In My Head And Felt A Pressure In My Breast, Like Floodwaters Rising Behind A Flimsy Dike. Before I Knew I Did It, The Soup Bowl Was Rising In My Hand As If Elevated By Some Supernatural Force. Then, Its Yellow-gray Contents Were Running Down The Nurse's Pudgy Face.

Supernatural Forces

The Day In 2004 When The Radiologist Told Me I Had Invasive Cancer, I Walked Down The Hospital Corridor Looking For A Phone To Call My Husband, And I Could Almost See The Fear Coming Toward Me Like A Big, Black Shadow.

The Brave Man, The Real Hero, Quakes With Terror, Sweats, Feels His Very Bowels Betray Him, And In Spite Of This Moves Forward To Do The Act He Dreads.

Here We Are, Alive, And You And I Will Have To Make It What We Can.

Yes, It Seems We've Got This Mutant Gene In Our Human Personality That Makes Us Susceptible To This Same Kind Of Mistake Over And Over Again. It's Really Uncanny How We Build These Beautiful Multicultural Edifices And Then Allow This Switch To Be Flipped And Everybody Goes, 'oh, The Other, Get Them Out Of Here.

I Was A News Reporter For 16 Years, Seven Of Them A Foreign Correspondent In The Middle East, Africa And The Balkans. Perhaps The Most Useful Equipment I Acquired In That Time Is A Lack Of Preciousness About The Act Of Writing. A Reporter Must Write. There Must Be A Story. The 'mot Juste' Unarriving? Tell That To Your Desk.

The Sarajevans Have A Very Particular World View - A Mordant Wit Coupled With This Unbearable Sadness And... Truckloads Of Guts, You Know.

Jewish Prayers Are Mostly About Daily Things - The Sliver Of A New Moon, Dew On The Grass, The Bread And The Wine.

How Strange It Is, Anna. Yesterday, I Have Filed In My Mind As A Good Day, Notwithstanding It Was Filled With Mortal Illness And The Grieving Of The Recently Bereft. Yet It Is A Good Day, For The Simple Fact That No One Died Upon It. We Are Brought To A Sorry State, That We Measure What Is Good By Such A Shortened Yardstick.

'you've Got Mail!' Exclaims The Cheery Automaton At America Online. The Flag On The Mailbox Icon Waves Invitingly On My Computer Screen. For A Second, I'm 10 Years Old Again, Waiting For The Postman's Whistle To Slice The Stillness Of An Australian Afternoon.

I Was Not 15 Anymore, And Choices No Longer Had That Same Clear, Bright Edge To Them.

They Say The Lord's Day Is A Day Of Rest, But Those Who Preach This Generally Are Not Women.

Instead Of Idleness, Vanity, Or An Intellect Formed By The Spoon-feeding Of Others, My Girls Have Acquired Energy, Industry, And Independence.

And When I'd Be Reporting In Israel, Palestinians Would Say, The Jews They're Not Like Us, And The Jews Would Say The Same Things About The Palestinians, They Don't Want What We Want. And I Never Bought It As A Reporter And I Don't Buy It As A Novelist. I Think, You Know, The Sound Of Somebody Crying For Their Lost Child Sounds The Same.

And At This Moment In History, Our Core Value Happens To Be The Raw, Aching Truth Of The Human Predicament. It May Also Be The Only Belief That Can Save Us As A Species. A Species That Will Continue To Find Comfort And Delight In The Companionship Of Animals, The Miracle Of Birds, The Colours Of The Corals And The Majesty Of The Forests. We Are In It Together, On This Blue Spinning Marble In The Cold And Silent Void. And We Must Act On That Belief, If We Are Going To Be Able To Continue To Live A Good Life Here, In This Beautiful And Fragile Country, On This Lovely Planet, Our Only Home.

Sometimes I Want To Have A Mental Book Burning That Would Scour My Mind Clean Of All The Filthy Visions Literature Has Conjured There. But How To Do Without 'the Illiad?' How To Do Without 'macbeth?

Writing Is Like Bricklaying; You Put Down One Word After Another. Sometimes The Wall Goes Up Straight And True And Sometimes It Doesn't And You Have To Push It Down And Start Again, But You Don't Stop; It's Your Trade.

Because I Worked As A Newspaper Reporter For About 14 Years Before Attempting My First Novel, I Learned To Write Under Almost Any Circumstances- By Candle Light, In Longhand, In African Villages Where There Was No Power, Under Shelling In Kurdistan.

For Most People, Chemotherapy Is No Longer The Chamber Of Horrors We Often Conceive It To Be. Yes, It Is An Ordeal For Some People, But It Wasn't For Me, Nor For Most Of The Patients I Got To Know During My Four Months Of Periodic Visits To The Chemo Suite.

If There Is One Class Of Person I Have Never Quite Trusted, It Is A Man Who Knows No Doubt.

The Thing That Most Attracts Me To Historical Fiction Is Taking The Factual Record As Far As It Is Known, Using That As Scaffolding, And Then Letting Imagination Build The Structure That Fills In Those Things We Can Never Find Out For Sure.

While I Love To Read Contemporary Fiction, I'm Not Drawn To Writing It. Perhaps It's Because The Former Journalist In Me Is Too Inhibited By The Press Of Reality; When I Think About Writing Of My Own Time I Always Think About Nonfiction Narratives. Or Perhaps It's Just That I Find The Present Too Confounding.

Who Is The Brave Man--he Who Feels No Fear? If So, Then Bravery Is But A Polite Term For A Mind Devoid Of Rationality And Imagination.

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I Borrowed His Brightness And Used It To See My Way, And Then Gradually, From The Habit Of Looking At The World As He Illuminated It, The Light In My Own Mind Rekindled.

To Know A Man's Library Is, In Some Measure, To Know A Man's Mind.

You Can't Write About The Past And Ignore Religion. It Was Such A Fundamental, Mind-shaping, Driving Force For Pre-modern Societies. I'm Very Interested In What Religion Does To Us - Its Capacity To Create Love And Empathy Or Hatred And Violence.

Does Any Woman Ever Count The Grains Of Her Harvest And Say: Good Enough? Or Does One Always Think Of What More One Might Have Laid In, Had The Labor Been Harder, The Ambition More Vast, The Choices More Sage?

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When I Write A Word In English, A Simple One, Such As, Say, 'chief,' I Have Unwittingly Ushered A Querulous Horde Into The Room. The Roman Legionary Is There, Shaking His 'cap,' Or Head, And Al Cap Is There, Slouching In His Signature Working Man's Headgear.

If A Man Is To Lose His Fortune, It Is A Good Thing If He Were Poor Before He Acquired It, For Poverty Requires Aptitude.

But That Franklin Trip Changed Me Profoundly. As I Believe Wilderness Experience Changes Everyone. Because It Puts Us In Our Place. The Human Place, Which Our Species Inhabited For Most Of Its Evolutionary Life. That Place That Shaped Our Psyches And Made Us Who We Are. The Place Where Nature Is Big And We Are Small.

My Mother's Family Were Full-on Irish Catholics - Faith In An Elaborate Old Fashioned, Highly Conservative And Madly Baroque Style. I Sort Of Fell Out Of The Tribe Over Women's Rights And Social Justice Issues When I Was Just 13 Years Old.

God Warns Us Not To Love Any Earthly Thing Above Himself, And Yet He Sets In A Mother's Heart Such A Fierce Passion For Her Babes That I Do Not Comprehend How He Can Test Us So.

Despair Is A Cavern Beneath Our Feet And We Teeter On Its Very Brink.

I'm A Praying Atheist. When I Hear An Ambulance Siren, I Ask For A Blessing For Those People In Trouble, Knowing That No One's Listening. I Think It's Just A Habit Of Mindfulness.

I Knew I Was Going To Be A Journalist When I Was Eight Years Old And I Saw The Printing Presses Rolling At The Sydney Newspaper Where My Dad Worked As A Proofreader.

We Are Not The Only Animal That Mourns; Apes Do, And Elephants, And Dogs. Yet We Are The Only One That Tortures.

September 11, 2001, Revealed Heroism In Ordinary People Who Might Have Gone Through Their Lives Never Called Upon To Demonstrate The Extent Of Their Courage.

When You're Writing Non-fiction, You Go As Far As You Can Go, And Then Ethically You Have To Stop. You Can't Go. You Can't Suppose. You Can't Imagine. And I Think There's Something In Human Nature That Wants To Finish The Story.

Even The Classics That We Read To Our Young Children Are Full Of Wolves' Fangs And Burning Ovens And Bloody Feet And Ice Shards Piercing Hearts. Even The New Testament Climaxes With An Act Of Unspeakable Torture. Might As Well Just Read To Our Kids From The Amnesty Annual Report And Be Done With It.

We Were Too Intelligent, Too Cynical For War. Of Course, You Don't Have To Be Stupid And Primitive To Die A Stupid, Primitive Death.

Both My Parents Loved Words. That Was The Big Deal In Our House.

Write What You Know. Every Guide For The Aspiring Author Advises This. Because I Live In A Long-settled Rural Place, I Know Certain Things. I Know The Feel Of A Newborn Lamb's Damp, Tight-curled Fleece And The Sharp Sound A Well-bucket Chain Makes As It Scrapes On Stone. But More Than These Material Things, I Know The Feelings That Flourish In Small Communities. And I Know Other Kinds Of Emotional Truths That I Believe Apply Across The Centuries.

Moral Certainty Can Deafen People To Any Truth Other Than Their Own.

Both My Mum And Dad Were Great Readers, And We Would Go Every Saturday Morning To The Library, And My Sister And I Had A Library Card When We Could Pass Off Something As A Signature, And All Of Us Would Come With An Armful Of Books.

You Go On. You Set One Foot In Front Of The Other, And If A Thin Voice Cries Out, Somewhere Behind You, You Pretend Not To Hear, And Keep Going.

...the Hagaddah Came To Sarajevo For A Reason. It Was Here To Test Us, To See If There Were People Who Could See That What United Us Was More Than What Divided Us. That To Be A Human Being Matters More Than To Be A Jew Or A Muslim, Catholic Or Orthodox. P. 361

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