I stumbled across this video recently while performing a most impressive act of procrastination. I was half-listening at first but as Gervais’s calm soothing British tone gesticulated across me, I found myself subconsciously nodding. I restarted the video and listened more closely.
I’m convinced that what Gervais says here is the single most important factor to writing things that people care about. So much so, I would argue that nobody reading this article today can become a professional writer until they go through this transformation of understanding. They have to accept it, understand it, then execute it, so they can graduate to the other side.
To give you the TLDR of the video, Gervais says that he started out writing fun silly stuff – cop movies where the cop “didn’t play by the rules.” And whenever he turned these scripts into his teacher, the teacher would tell him, “This isn’t any good. Write what you know.”
But Gervais was convinced that people didn’t care about boring truthful everyday stuff. He wanted the fun stuff. The stuff that’s on TV. The stuff he saw in the movies. So he kept writing what he wanted. And he kept getting bad grades.
Finally, he figured he’d pull a fast one on the teacher. As it so happened, every day, his mother would go next door to take care of an elderly woman and sometimes Ricky would go with her. It was the single most boring thing you could write about, in Gervais’s opinion. But it was something “that he knew.”
So he wrote about a day following his mom over to this elderly woman’s house. And he went into excruciating detail. He wanted to make sure that he was writing EVERY SINGLE THING HE KNEW about this experience in order to prove to his teacher that the teacher was wrong and that writing about this sort of thing only led to boring people to death.
I think you know where this is going. When he got the grade back, he’d received his first A. And that’s when the lightbulb went on for Gervais. It isn’t about all the fantastical larger-than-life craziness. It’s about humans connecting with other humans. You achieve this by writing what you know. And because you’re writing what you know, you are writing THE TRUTH. And THE TRUTH is the single most important part of getting readers to connect with your writing.
This isn’t the first time I’ve heard a writer share this story. I hear a lot of writers say this was the moment they finally understood writing. Neil Gaiman talks about how nobody cared about his writing until he started “telling the truth.”
But what is “the truth?” What does “the truth” look like?
It starts with, like Gervais says, “What you know.” For there is nothing you know more truthfully than your own life.
I used to teach tennis, as some of you know. So let’s use that as our theoretical backdrop. We’ve got Writer 1, who took a couple of tennis lessons when he was a kid and wants to write a movie about a tennis pro. Then we’ve got Writer 2, who taught tennis for ten years, and wants to write a similar movie (me).
The first scene of Writer 1’s movie is probably going to be our tennis pro showing up at the Beverly Hills Country Club or a similar upscale tennis place. He’s got his tennis whites. He’s got a 5 o’clock shadow. He makes some funny quips to a few co-workers, as well as the hottie tennis pro he’s dating. She asks if they’re still having lunch later. Of course. He rushes out to teach his first lesson, a sexy MILF who’s giving him googly eyes the second he steps on the court. He tries to teach her but she can’t help but make a bunch of sexual innuendos during the lesson. Afterwards, she proposes that all future lessons take place at her private tennis court. He has to practically slip out of her grip to get away from her. And that’s the first scene.
Now, let me tell what a morning with me was like as a tennis pro.
I would ride my bike to work because my car was always broken. I had timed it so I got to work at exactly 8am. That way I could technically say that I was on time, even though it would take me another five minutes before I got on the court and started my lesson, to a client who was in no way interested in or trying to flirt with me. They were just mad because their lesson was going to start late.
Now, I didn’t teach at Beverly Hills. I taught at Westwood Tennis. A park. Which meant that I would have to wake up the homeless person sleeping in front of the tennis shack door every morning and tell him to get out of the way so I could go inside.
After he took his sweet time, I would go inside and begin looking for the necessary tools I needed to teach my lessons. One thing you have to realize about tennis pros is that they’re always breaking their strings. Cause they’re playing all day. We all had 3 or 4 rackets but we would eventually break the strings on those rackets too. And since we’re all so lazy, we don’t get them restrung. Instead, we use the demo rackets, which we’re not supposed to use cause those are reserved for clients to help motivate them to buy said overpriced rackets. Since all the pros would snatch these demos – because they’re all breaking their strings too – the demo racket strings would break as well.
When this happened, we’d start using the kid’s demo rackets. These rackets were much smaller and way flimsier and, most importantly, they didn’t look professional. Half of them were girl’s rackets for 10 year olds that had Disney themes on them. Which meant that, it wasn’t uncommon for me to walk on the court with a tiny pink Little Miss Mermaid tennis racket. This when I would occasionally have to play with advanced players. That never went over well.
But the racket wasn’t even the main problem. The main problem was the tennis balls. All us pros were responsible for our own tennis balls. We had to buy them ourselves. And when you have to buy 50 cans of tennis balls at $3.50 a pop, that adds up. Especially when all of the annoying beginner players keep hitting the balls over the fence where they would vaporize to never be seen again. This would annoy me to such a degree that, for a while, I had a rule, that if any of my lessons hit the ball over the fence, they had to stop playing immediately and go retrieve it. They weren’t allowed to come back until they found it.
With the constant dwindling tennis ball supply there was a lot of ball thievery going on. If a pro had gotten so lazy as to not buy new balls in a long time, their ball cart wouldn’t have enough balls for a lesson. So if we were the one with the depleted cart (which I often was) we would steal balls from the other tennis pros’ carts when they weren’t around. Tennis ball stealing became so rampant that each pro started buying multiple locks to lock the top of their tennis ball carts so you couldn’t steal their balls
This never stopped me. I would reach my hand down through the sides of my fellow tennis pros’ carts, scraping the insides of my arms to the point of bleeding as I fished out one agonizing ball at a time until I had enough to teach my lesson. It got so bad that everyone would mark their balls with their initials in permanent marker. This did not deter me if I needed balls bad enough. You can’t show up to a lesson with 15 balls. You’ll be done feeding balls within 2 minutes.
I could go on. But I think you get the point. The first writer writes the generic version of being a tennis pro because they don’t know any of the truths that go into teaching tennis. They’ve never done it before. Whereas I have over a million unique details of what goes on as a teaching pro. And most of them are surprising. I doubt any of you would’ve guessed that that was an average morning for a tennis pro.
By the way, if you want to see a real world example of Writer 1 in action, go watch the pilot episode of “Based on a True Story” on Peacock. The main guy character is a tennis teacher and they write him almost exactly the way Writer 1 wrote it. There’s zero truth to it and you’ll notice how detached you feel from his tennis storyline for that reason.
I suspect this is why I hate shows like Ahsoka right now. I don’t feel any truth at all when I watch that show. Granted, it’s much harder to write what you know if you’re writing fantasy or sci-fi or an action film that takes place in Casablanca. You’ve never been to Casablanca so how are you going to make that sound truthful?
Well, the answer to that is, YOU’RE NOT. You really aren’t. No matter how hard you try. What you should do instead is pick a concept that covers subject matter you know well. The chances of you writing something that will resonate with others will go up exponentially.
But we also have to be realistic. Some writers like writing fantastical stories. And it’s unrealistic to think that you’ll never run into story sequences that don’t have some elements that you’re unfamiliar with. So what do you do if that’s the case?
The answer, believe it or not, is simple. While you won’t be able to write about subject matter that you know, you can always write CHARACTERS THAT YOU KNOW. And if you’re writing characters you know, the character side of your story will be truthful.
This is why it’s a smart idea to base your main character on yourself. Or some aspect of yourself. That way, you’ll be able to write them truthfully. I always tell writers, figure out what your biggest struggle is at this moment in your life. Then have your main character going through the same thing.
If you’re struggling through a hard divorce, your hero should be struggling through a hard divorce. If you’re struggling with belief in yourself, your hero should struggle to believe in himself. If you’re trying to emerge out of the shadow of a successful parent? Yeah, I think you get what you have to do.
Then apply this same approach to as many characters in the story as you can. Base some on other parts of you. Maybe there’s another part of you that’s frustrated that you can’t stand up for what you want. So give that flaw to a supporting character. And for the rest of the characters, base them on people you know or who you’ve met throughout your life. Figure out what represented those people and simply transfer it over to your characters.
If you can do this with your characters, you can write big elaborate screenplays and still have them feel grounded and truthful. Cause all your characters will act with an underlining sense of truth. And you’re writing what you know. If you want to see this in action, check out James Gunn’s studio movies. He’s good at writing gigantic fanciful movies yet still finding the humanity in all the characters. I’m convinced he does that by writing what he knows and always staying truthful.
I can promise you this. If you write a giant action plot for a subject you’ve never had any personal experience with and then you ALSO don’t build your characters around truth, your script is dead in the water. This is something all writers have to figure out if they want to write great stories.
So get to work!
And I’ll be back tomorrow to finally review our second place script for the First Page Showdown!
