I was struck recently by the duality of the old adage ‘write what you know.’
For me this has always resonated in terms of beat, the beat of spaces, the beat of people and what they do, how they interact… what you know (within which is always also located what you do not know).
But then recently in experience of writing a longer form story, where imminent proceedings in the story were in some form apparent – but not written, I found myself fretting about ‘further ahead’ how things would pan this way or that. Or specifically about a certain degree of nebulouness with what I thought might happen.
At which point it occured that I should write what I know, in that the area directly imminent in the story was there (as an immanence), it was what I already knew, but incomplete in its realisation, with its own space of possibilities for doors and for threads and for seeds to be planted and realised and followed and transferred and spread and resonant and concatenating…
In short and in the living being of the story, it was a moment at which to realise that the way was already there.

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