schemingreader

I have been meaning to write a post explaining what I mean when I say that I'm looking for a job as a grant writer. My dear jamc91 asked about it, and I didn't respond right away. But this evening, sor_bet had an interesting post about not being able to relate to her characters' suffering because her own life was too good. Here's my chance to think about the ways that writing fiction and non-fiction overlap.

As I have probably said, I was an aspiring academic. I did a doctorate in European History, which I finally finished in 1997, and I taught for awhile. I wasn't making much headway as an academic, and then I was in a big car accident and decided to throw in the towel. I wanted to work in a job that would help real human beings, but my main skills were research, writing, and teaching. I felt burnt out by teaching, as much as I loved it, but I learned that writing grant proposals to foundations required the same skills as academic writing.

You see, friends, there are charitable foundations who want to give away some money for a good cause. Sometimes these are foundations that a for-profit company has established to give away some of their profits. Sometimes they are family foundations, from a single wealthy family. Sometimes they are from a large bequest after someone has died. The foundations publish requests for proposals (sometimes known by their acronym, RFPs.) Non-profit organizations (certified as such by the Internal Revenue Service) apply for charitable donations from these foundations. Some organizations have a specialist in writing these proposals, and some drag a staff member who should be doing something else away from her work to write them.

I mainly write for organizations that address some social problem. I have to describe the problem that the program addresses, and then the program. The writing is formal and sometimes even a little mechanical, but it requires imagination. (If you are interested, I can tell you more about the form and content of the proposal, just ask.)

I have to be able to imagine, first of all, how the money I'm requesting will actually affect real people. Whose job does the grant support? What does that person do in her job that helps people? In the end I have to be able to imagine the people who get the help. I try to think about what it would be like to face, say, having a kid and being homeless. I have to think about the individual person who faces this problem without either romanticizing her or blaming her. Or say it's a grant for making the institutional kitchen nicer--so that it can put out meals on wheels for elderly people. The person making the meal, the drivers, the elderly person getting the meal--have to seem real.

So it's a job where the connection between empathy and imagination is really obvious. Though I guess when I was writing history that connection was obvious, too. Read what someone else has written and understand his life--though he lived far away and long ago, and even in another language.

Our empathy for fictional characters who are really different from us is also based in this kind of imagination. We don't have to have suffered trauma in childhood to understand a character who has. We know such people in real life. Our empathy for the werewolf or the space alien isn't based on being a werewolf or a space alien.

All writing is imaginative in some way, because we have to imagine how someone else will read what we write. We have to think about what it's like to be another person. This is true even in the dullest formal writing, not only when we are impersonating a character entire.

Which is why I think that the old addage "write what you know" is so confusing. You can never really know what it's like to be someone else. But on the other hand, as a human being, your imagination can make empathy possible for nearly anyone.