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Do Not Be Afraid to Write What You Know

By Mashaw McGuinnis 

An acquaintance of mine texted after reading some of my novel-in-progress. “Don’t try so hard with stereotypical language and trailer park folks . . . I don’t buy it.” I wanted to disappear into the furniture, but instead I texted back a bumbling explanation that I wasn’t trying too hard, that the people in my stories are the people that I know, and I know them well.

I always dread sharing my work because my middle-class friends never believe me when I say my characters, experiences, and vernacular come directly from my own dysfunctional, lower-class upbringing.

By “lower class,” I mean more than low income or under-educated. I was raised by Dust Bowl migrant grandparents. Two generations back, only one had more than a seventh-grade education. Californians called them “Arkies” when they’d arrived hungry from Arkansas in the late 30s, searching for work. Like Steinbeck’s Joads, they picked fruit and cotton and slept in government camps in the Central Valley.

Eventually, my grandfather secured a union factory job, but their hardscrabble roots ran deep. My clan put the “hard” in hardscrabble. One aunt died from an overdose, leaving eight kids behind—two came to live with us. My spitfire grandmother went to jail for shooting three neighbors, and one Sunday fried chicken supper was interrupted with a drug-withdrawal seizure requiring an ambulance. When my grandparents died, they left nothing but a family tradition of grit.

These experiences—not unusual in my family—made for a wealth of material once I learned to write. But nothing prepared me for the responses I received from my fellow writers.

Over and over, I heard “you’re exaggerating” or “your characters are hyperboles.” (The first time I heard that I was too ashamed to ask what “hyperbole” meant.) In critique groups, workshops and conferences, I think of those people as “normies”—middle-class people, or often, upper-middle class people, who grew up wearing braces and taking college prep classes in high school, raised by parents who never threatened to kill each other or send the kids to foster homes. Their parents were either college-educated professionals, or they raised their kids to become that.

Normies in my workshops didn’t know the person sitting next to them resorted to winning TV game shows to pay for teeth that looked like theirs. Most would never suspect she’d barely squeaked by in high school with a “C” average or understand why she stumbled over the pronunciation of “cacophony.”

Writers like me—blue collar, less-educated, rough around the edges—whatever category we claim, we learn by reading. We may understand definitions, but don’t hear the words pronounced in a real-world scenario. If I ever used “cacophony” in a conversation with my relatives they’d assume I was playing a prank. I wouldn’t attempt to work these terms into conversations at conferences or workshops, lest I mispronounce them to people who tout their MFAs and Pushcart nominations. If only conferences could offer workshops in how to navigate through a roomful of educated, middle-class writers.

The normies’ families I most admired were upper-middle class—they went on vacations instead of parole. Their homes had real art. Their parents threw dinner parties. Mine had real guns and threw dinner plates. My scrappy upbringing was one of constant chaos. We didn’t have music or literature or own our homes, and we sure didn’t dream of college. We worried the next fist in the wall would get us evicted. Each family member used whatever tools we could to eat, sleep and keep working. Arkies were programed to survive, nothing more.

Recently, I finally came out in a private Facebook group for women writers. After reading for years about the other members’ publications, fellowships, and acceptance into acclaimed retreats like Hedgebrook, I fessed up. I asked if there were other lower-class writers, like me, who lurked in the shadows of the FB group, feeling like they don’t belong but not wanting to reveal their true roots.

Many members responded with their own versions of my story. Yes, their “normie” counterparts accused them of hyperbolizing their characters’ vernacular, confronted them on their described scenes, even settings. One woman said her critique group didn’t believe a trailer park would really have so much grass. The acquaintance who’d texted me her opinion of my chapter (and who assumed I was middle-class) once said to me that Pulitzer-Prize winner Barbara Kingsolver did a much better job of writing lower-class characters than I had done.

Where are the under-educated, lower-class writers with generational trauma supposed to fit? Like transplants from other countries, or people from mixed cultures, we don’t feel at home in either world. I can masquerade as a normie for the short term, but when you’re raised in a family that racks up jail terms like frequent flier miles, others eventually spot the squalor seeping through the cracks.

When I employed the help of a writing coach to help me craft an entry to a regional contest, he said, “That’s great, but it’s not the kind of award that will change your life.” I cobbled together the courage to respond, while fearing I’d sound like a character from Hee Haw to someone with his background. The coach taught MFA students, he’d won awards, and he was a fellow at some mucky-muck writer place. I struggled to explain how, for someone like me, a regional award felt life changing. (I omitted the part about how much I needed the $900 prize money.)

Someone in my Facebook discussion offered, “One thing working-class writers have over everyone else is a work ethic.” Now at 61, I realize what I concealed for so long is actually my biggest asset. More than anything to succeed, a writer needs tenacity. And as my tough-as-leather grandma once told me, “You want something bad enough, you’ll fight like a rabid dog to get it.”

I’m trying, Granny.

Originally posted as “Blue Collar, Less-Educated, Rough Around the Edges: The Other Marginalized Writers,” Brevity, August 19. 2024.

Mashaw McGuinnis started writing from bed while fighting chronic Lyme Disease. Her work has appeared in Good Housekeeping, The Sun magazine, and other publications. The opening chapter to her novel-in-progress won first place in women’s fiction at the Pacific Northwest Writer’s Association’s writing contest, and her flash memoir, “Taft, Ca.” was a recent winner in Writing by Writers Short Short contest. She has a high school diploma from Hueneme High School. Learn more about her work at Mashaw McGuinniss, Writer.