JUST WALKING AROUND. That’s where context comes from. By being out, being aware. And context is what you need if you are going to write memoir. In fact, the role of context in writing needs to be understood for you to achieve as a writer. This is a greatly misunderstood aspect of the art of writing what you know, since many people think that since the material is from our own lives, we’ve got all we need to write. We do – and we don’t.

To make something universal to others, a person writing memoir must contextualize the work. There must be something familiar to the reader, even if that familiarity is merely a vague sense that the piece was published in the right season, or is responding to something larger going on in the wide, wide world. For this, you must read, and you must look around.

And whenever I discuss context in writing and bring up how to get some, a howl goes up in the class.

“But I’m a full-time mother,” someone will say. “I can’t get out.”

“I work three jobs,” another will offer. “I’m caregiving my elderly mother,” perhaps. And in those responses they reveal that we think “looking around” means something more complex than literally looking around.

So, start chanting this to yourself: Context in writing. And then, let me suggest some place to go to illustrate the wrote of context in writing what you know.

It does not. For a lovely little eavesdrop on a couple of people looking around, listen to this, a walking tour of lower Manhattan with Studio 360 radio host Kurt Andersen,  and the marvelous artist, Maira Kalman. In this little afternoon, with no particular goal, they walk and pick things up, and have coffee, and look at the world. And in that they remind us that artists do not have a special pipeline to the mystics that allows them some special vision, but that instead, to be great at what you do, you merely have to get out and take a walk, see where it leads you, and respond.

Try it.