Words&Dirt

“Now comes the big question: What are you going to write about? And the equally big answer: Anything you damn well want. Anything at all…as long as you tell the truth.

The dictum in writing classes used to be ‘write what you know.’ Which sounds good, but what if you want to write about starships exploring other planets or a man who murders his wife and then tries to dispose of her body with a wood-chipper? How does the writer square either of these, or a thousand other fanciful ideas, with the ‘write-what-you-know’ directive?

I think you begin by interpreting ‘write what you know’ as broadly and inclusively as possible. If you’re a plumber, you know plumbing, but that is far from the extent of your knowledge; the heart also knows things, and so does the imagination. Thank God. If not for heart and imagination, the world of fiction would be a pretty seedy place. It might not even exist at all.”

––On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, by Stephen King, loc. 1777-85

“For those readers who recoil at the suggestion of another tax, consider that the two mechanisms I have described, cap-and-trade systems and green taxes, are not actually new levies upon society. Someone is going to be paying the costs of environmental destruction regardless. In the present system, this ‘someone’ is either innocent bystanders or future generations. These proposals merely shift these costs onto those who create them and profit from them.

However it is accomplished, when the costs of pollution are internalized, the best business solution comes into alignment with the best environmental decision.”

––Sacred Economics: Money, Gift & Society in the Age of Transition, by Charles Eisenstein, pg. 179