Write What You Know

(The Lagavulin Distillery, Islay, Scotland)

I normally wouldn’t advocate taking advice from suicides, but Hemmingway put it best, as only he could:

“Write what you know.”

By most recent count, I’ve spent nearly $100k of my parents’ scratched-out savings, tens more of my own, burned through the charity of strings of relatives, friends, and philanthropic interests, pissed away an awful lot of goodwill, and invested all of my years learning that I know very little. Maybe 10-12 pages, all said and done.

Whatever this thing ultimately becomes, I aim for it to be guided by that instruction. All the pages and hours I’ve accumulated before have been creative efforts, or at best attempts to build fictive or narrative structures around things that there just isn’t any knowing of. Assays and essays, that had I been honest, Borges, Marquez, and the others basically closed the book on already. We’re to keep it simple here. Cut down on the conjecture. Avoid the phrase, “my impression of.” Ignore frivolity. Not buy the car for the cup holders.

Malt whiskey, which is by my count, mankind’s 4th greatest accomplishment, is made by germinating barley grain in “mash” to trigger fermentation. The resulting fluid is fired by peat fed hellfires in copper stills so that the light fluids evaporate and are separated from byproducts. This process is repeated until what is left is a neutral grain alcohol. This is then aged in oak casks, where it acquires taste, color, and further potency.

If you for some reason didn’t follow that metaphor…
I spend maybe 16 hours awake every day. Raw data is accumulated. We’ll sprinkle some insights from great minds (The aforementioned Hemmingway, Bukowski, Dr. Dre, etc.) on top and let it ferment. Then we’re going to fire it; put some pressure on it. The true bits will rise out of the mixture, having taken on the hard smokiness of the distilling. We’ll keep doing this until only the essence is left. Then I’ll stick it in the archive for a while (which is ironically what the distilleries call their repositories) and let it take on perspective from time and distance. I’ll take a look at them some time later, have a dram or two, write off the angel’s share, and apply finishing touches. Maybe, if we’re lucky, I’ll be able to pull enough good stuff from the casks to put together the Lagavulin 16-year-old of books. The sum of what I know, with a healthy dose of peat smoke.