Sometimes Experience Is Not Enough

On Researching What You Know

In the revision workshop I taught this past semester, each writer was required to conduct research. For some writers the direction was obvious: a speculative writer was writing a character with a “sleeping beauty” sickness based on Kleine-Levin syndrome, and it made sense for her to research the actual condition. Another writer needed to learn more about divorce law in the state of Massachusetts. Other writers, meanwhile, were working in the space of auto fiction; they were writing stories set in places they knew intimately and centered on events grounded in their lived experiences. What did research have to offer them?

Earlier in the semester we’d read Alexander Chee’s essay “The Autobiography of my Novel,” where he writes: “Autobiographical Fiction requires as much research as any other kind of fiction, in my experience.” Yes, yes, yes. Because here’s the thing about familiarity: it can be blinkering. When we have deep familiarity with an environment we might not realize how much we take for granted. My last novel, State of Paradise, is set in Florida, my homeland. I know so much about this place. I know the weather, the politics, the interstates, the names of the flowers. And yet I came to realize there were certain facts I had just accepted. How did that bridge come by its name? That urban legend about the haunted stretch of interstate where cell phone signals always drop–where did that story come from? Most of the time the real stories, uncovered by research, were weirder and more grisly than anything I could have possibly made up. It was actually amazing to discover all that I didn’t know about this place. Much of this material did not make it into the book, but it expanded and challenged my thinking in important ways.

Now I’m working on a new novel, Ring of Night, which is, in part, about boxing. At least you won’t have to do any research, people often tell me when I describe the book to them. They are assuming that, because I spend a great deal of my actual life in a boxing gym, the hours I log there are all the research I could possibly need. There is a little bit of truth to this: there are moments in Ring that I can’t imagine having written without the experience of fighting myself. Things I’ve heard coaches shout from the corner. Little details about how amateur bouts work. The trick my OG coach in Florida had for getting a stitch out of a kid’s side. What it feels like to get your wraps cut off after a fight. I have some of those old wraps on my writing desk, to remind me that there will be moments when whatever project I’m working on will feel impossible, but that impossibility is just a feeling–getting in the ring for real once felt impossible too.

So yes: lived experience can provide a lot. But it cannot always provide everything. For one thing, I am not writing an essay; I am not describing the experience of being in the ring from my own perspective (even as these descriptions might be informed by my own perspective). I am channeling an invented character. I know what fighting means to me; my task when I started this book was to discover what fighting means for her. I have done–am doing–loads of conventional research. I’ve read books, listened to podcasts, watched documentaries, dug around in archives. Making contact with the minds of other fighters helped me to imagine the character at the center of this novel. And sometimes sheer saturation can help a world really bloom.

But also: just because we’ve lived through something doesn’t mean we have the all the tools to bring that experience to life for a reader. Perhaps this is especially true when the lived experience is intense. When I think back on my last fight: look, my mind was on fire. A few moments are really sharp and vivid, but a lot of the night is a blur. I don’t remember what my coaches said to me in the corner. I don’t even really remember getting my hand raised. I remember how I felt, but a lot of the granular physical details are hazy. Research can help us stand outside this intensity a little, can help us acquire the roundness of perspective we need to animate how it felt to be there on the page.

For the students who were unsure of how useful research would be for them, here is what I advised:

1. Make a list of the “givens” in this world and then press hard on the smallest details. Why are these the givens? Why are people like this? Why is this place like this? Ask the questions you might not have thought to ask before and see where that leads you.

2. Move through familiar places and activities with a deeper, sharper kind of attention. One writer was working on a close-to-the-bone story set in the neighborhood where she’d ridden out the pandemic lockdown. I suggested she walk around these familiar blocks and do nothing but look very carefully. She wound up clocking a number of details she’d never noticed before. When I am at the gym to train or to fight my book is the farthest thing from my mind. I am experiencing a lot, yes, but there’s a lot I won’t remember because my attention is so constricted. Sometimes when I go to a fight to watch someone else, I pan out. I look carefully at the world and make a note of the details that stick.

In his essay, Chee makes a critical distinction: “I made a world I knew, not the world I knew…” I cannot stress how important this is for writers who are working from an autobiographical space. In the revision workshop, some of the writers who were hewing the closest to lived experience were struggling because they were writing the world and not a world—their sense of possibility was constricted, making it hard to keep up the momentum. I had the same problem when writing this story “Last Night”—I couldn’t get past the world for so long and therefore couldn’t ever finish the story. It was a random thread of research, into community swimming pools in Boston, that helped me find my way to a world, even though swimming is scarcely mentioned in the final version of the story.

And that’s the thing about research. Sometimes it is about getting a factual handle on a place and moment in time: like, I’m setting a novel during the French revolution and I need to know what people were wearing. But sometimes research—and perhaps this is especially true when we’re researching the orbits we know so well—is about unlocking something within us. It’s about finding the door we did not know we needed to open.