write what you don't know

and i don't know a lot of stuff.

I’m pretty careful with the words that I write. Something I think that’s a mistake. It feels like we’re in a cultural economy that rewards noise, volume, and confidence in your screeching more than anything. Comedians who say louder or more ignorant stuff only gain more popularity. It’s a pretty set formula: make the same punch-down jokes, overreact to the same X (formerly Twitter) outrage you begged for, cry to Jordan Peterson, book the next arena tour, tape for Netflix, rinse and repeat. Those of us who aren’t following that formula are honestly dumb as hell.

Years ago, I saw a Toni Morrison doc called The Pieces I Am. She said one quote that I think about a lot. Taken from a 2014 interview—

“It seems as though so much fiction, particularly that by younger people, is very much about themselves. Love and death and stuff, but my love, my death, my this, my that. Everybody else is a light character in that play… When I taught creative writing at Princeton, [my students] had been told all of their lives to write what they knew. I always began the course by saying, “Don’t pay any attention to that.” First, because you don’t know anything and second, because I don’t want to hear about your true love and your mama and your papa and your friends. Think of somebody you don’t know. What about a Mexican waitress in the Rio Grande who can barely speak English? Or what about a Grande Madame in Paris? Things way outside their camp. Imagine it, create it. Don’t record and editorialize on some event that you’ve already lived through. I was always amazed at how effective that was. They were always out of the box when they were given license to imagine something wholly outside their existence. I thought it was a good training for them. Even if they ended up just writing an autobiography, at least they could relate to themselves as strangers.”

I think Morrison’s point is beautiful. She’s giving her students permission to de-center themselves and to think about something beyond their own little lives. It’s obviously a thin line, a tightrope in execution, because we’ve all seen trash representations written out of ignorance. Caricatures drawn from stereotypes from bad movies or whatever. Yet the idea of putting in the effort to start with other characters, to consider them as full human beings, to allow them to make mistakes and try and grow, to find yourself in them and themselves in you, to treat them with the three-dimensionality that you’d treat your own avatar… That feels like a pretty cool use of making art. I don’t know.

It just feels so self-serving to always just start a story with, “Well, there’s me, the center of Earth, walking around doing a thing…” Just as there’s a thin line when writing characters from different worlds, there’s a thin line between writing what you know and solipsistic narcissism. I feel like some artists confuse talking about themselves with introspection. Yet introspection is only worth anything if you’re using it to try to connect to other people and understand them.

I don’t just want to write navel-gazing stuff. It’s more than narcissistic, but it also just depresses me. It’s one of the reasons I can’t free-write personal essay stuff much. The more narrow the scope, the more it’s just my own sad thoughts.

I’ve always been sort of drawn to stories that feel adjacent to me. In Flatbush, I played a shitty public school teacher with a Xanax addiction. It was, in part, how I viewed what my life would have been without comedy, without writing. I studied education in college, so that’s the route I could’ve seen myself going — just a well-meaning, but out-of-his-depths teacher. Not white savior-ing anybody, always falling short, but maintaining the delusion to think the next time might be different. Like Charlie Brown kicking the football. I feel like you need that kind of delusion both in comedy and in teaching.

Anyway, that was part of Flatbush, but beyond that, it was a show about a community. That always interested me more, the idea of de-centering myself but also finding where my character existed in a universe. There were characters that didn’t think much about my character at all, which I loved. Everyone had their own wants and needs. And my guy was an entry-point, but ultimately, just another dipshit.

I know it’s a tightrope when trying to write three-dimensional worlds, because I received some backlash before Flatbush was even written. The day the show was announced, an organizer from a local community group encouraged a slew of death threats in my direction. I understood their concerns. We were people who lived in Flatbush, but were not born and raised there. So, who the fuck were we? What were our intentions? Why should they trust that we weren’t going to write a negative depiction? I understand all that. It’s fair. It’s valid.

Ultimately, no one murdered me. And the (controlled) hate that came in right after the announcement was one of the reasons it meant so much when the show was so well-received by people in the neighborhood. The importance of getting things right is one of the reasons why we had so many people who were part of the show who were born-and-raised in Brooklyn. Amazing writers, actors, music supervisors, camera, crew.

A range of perspectives and lived experiences gave the world that richness. That all comes through listening, through collaboration, but also (I think) from that place of fear. That place of having to admit, ‘I don’t know.’ It’s a scary thing to admit, but then it forces you to push yourself to ask questions. To listen, to learn, to connect, to be open, to grow. To figure out something through writing the thing.

It’s stressful, though. When you’re trying to carefully build something, when you care about the stories you’re trying to tell, when the last thing you’d want is for anyone to feel reduced or minimized. In those moments of anxiety, I feel tempted to just avoid it entirely. Like, I should just write a solo show where the only real character is Dan The Victim-Protagonist. But I think that sucks.

Anyway, it’s funny to think very carefully about all of this shit, then remember that some folks who just flood out a constant stream of half-assed, thoughtless content are lining up deals for their next five specials. Maybe the solution is don’t write what you know, don’t write what you don’t know. Just stop thinking and ramble.

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