Write What You Know by Nancy L. Eady

             “Write what you know” is a writing maxim. Like most maxims, it contains truth but is not meant to be taken literally. If it were, the world’s literature would comprise multiple autobiographies, most of which, while fascinating to the authors who lived through them, wouldn’t be nearly as interesting to the rest of the world. And we would be without hobbits, Harry Potter, fairy tales and Nero Wolfe.

            I grew up in a naval family. Until I was sixteen, we moved every two years all over the country (and once overseas).  Right before my junior year in high school, we moved to the well-known naval metropolis of Montgomery, Alabama. I have lived in Alabama ever since, except for a short three-year stint in North Carolina when my husband and I were first married.  While Montgomery itself is a nice sized city (as long as you’re not looking for the excitement of New York City and don’t mind the sidewalks rolling up around 10 on weekends and 9 on weekdays), I also spent most of those years living in small towns of 10,000 people or less.

            In addition, my family has a good sense of humor and funny stuff happens to us. For example, there was the time that the townhouse my mom, my sisters and I lived in had water leak from the bathroom upstairs into the fluorescent light in the kitchen. I was out of state at college,  but my two sisters discovered the problem when they came home from school. They called Mom, who sensibly told them to shut the water off, without realizing they didn’t know how. So she had to leave work early to do it herself, and by the time she got home, she was not a happy camper.  

            After she turned the water off, she went downstairs and studied the light, one of those large industrial flat fluorescent lights with a plastic cover. She decided to try tilting the plastic cover to see if she could get the water to drain into a bucket on the floor. This theory, sound in principle, failed spectacularly in practice and she ended up drenched, with water everywhere but in the bucket. One reason I am convinced God loves me—my two sisters, knowing Mom was upset, looked at each other and fled to opposite rooms in the house to smother their laughter in their bedrooms. Had I been home, I would have laughed immediately, probably not the best move for family harmony.

            Or there was the time my husband and I got ready to sell our house to move to a better school district for our daughter. Kayla had just turned five. The problem with selling our house at that period in our life was the fact that we had two indoor dogs, so we had the house shown by appointment only. While that wasn’t an insurmountable challenge, it did mean last-minute rearranging of schedules when someone wanted to tour the house.

            One Saturday afternoon, we got a call about a realtor wanting to show the house at 1, so we dropped the child and the dogs off at Mark’s mother’s house. Since Mark’s Mom told us not to worry about picking them up until after supper, Mark and I dutifully toodled around for three hours and returned to the house at 4, giving the potential buyers a wide berth. We intended to take advantage of the remaining hours of our unexpectedly free afternoon enthusiastically at home.  About 5, the front door opened, and the (very late) potential buyers and (surprised) real estate agent—well, they didn’t quite catch us in flagrante delicto (if that applies to married couples), but it was a close enough call to laugh about ever since. (And for the record, no, they did not buy the house.) 

            And there is my profession—as a civil plaintiffs’ lawyer who has specialized in research and writing for over 20 years, I possess an unusual skill set, one that has become as much a part of me as the physical traits I was born with, like brown hair and eyes.

            So my “write you know” morphed into a protagonist who is a female lawyer working in a three-lawyer firm in a small Southern town. When her senior partner, who is a father figure to her, is charged with vehicular homicide, she is honor bound to defend him. I use humor to leaven an otherwise serious mystery. Now all I have to do is find a buyer for it.

            What does your “write what you know” look like?