Write what you know.

 

 

If I had a dollar for every time I heard these four words passed around creative writing circles, I’d probably have $20, which if I’m smart, I’d spend on either jumper cables or a family field trip, apparently (source).

 

 

An artistic rendering of me off to spend my purely hypothetical wealth the ‘smart’ way (original)

 

 

The point is is that a) this advice is pretty common and b) I tend to avoid writing communities that live by the mantra of “write what you know.” There’s something that has always not been appealing to me about this advice, something that doesn’t sit right with me about it that I’ve never been quite able to pinpoint. I think it might be because I’m a lover of fiction. The further removed from reality as we know it, the more I’ll typically enjoy a work. I enjoy supernatural horror, fantasy epics, and action-packed sci-fi novels. And like many writers, I tend to dabble in writing stories that are similar in genre to that of works I enjoy.

 

 

When I look at the projects that I have taken on over the course of the past four or five years, most if not all of them can apply to the idea of writing what I know. One is a story about fictional world politics and the impacts of colonialism in a world of fictional humanoid species that have mind powers and rigid religious and nationalist systems. Another is a story about a young necromancer in a medievalesque world trying to stop the rapture mid-apocalypse with the help of a psychic medium and an assassin-in-training. Even the only project set on Earth as we know it is set in New England in the 1830s.

 

 

In the specific cases of these stories, I cannot “write what I know” simply because I don’t have personal experience with a lot of these things. I cannot personally attest to being an astral-projecting reptilian-humanoid who is a powerless figurehead within a totalitarian government. Nor can I claim to know what it’s like to be a necromancer on a quest to save the Earth from demons when the rest of the world believes I’m the one causing the rapture in the first place. And again, I definitely don’t know what it’s like to be a gold-digging midwestern young man in search of a young heiress to marry so I don’t have to work on my family farm. All of these are surface-level descriptions of main characters I have outlined for projects of mine that definitely don’t constitute as things I know first-hand.

 

 

Still, the advice of only writing what you know could be interpreted as understanding people in general. Most books, movies, and T.V. shows center around people. When these forms of fiction portray people in a way that just doesn’t feel natural, it shows. If writing what you know is actually meant to be interpreted to mean understanding that people are complex, have motivations, and are influenced by their pasts and the people around them, I would change my approach toward the advice mildly. With enough experience with and observation of social interactions in different social settings and reading how life-like people are translated to the page, anyone can write characters that feel human. Because of this, I argue that there isn’t a real purpose to this advice if this is the intended takeaway. Most people, I feel, are familiar enough with other people that they can create new fictional ones with an air of verisimilitude.

 

 

Even if the things a writer chooses to write about are real and grounded within a contemporary setting, I still argue that they should not be limited to what they already know. Research is always a helpful tool to use in the pre-writing/planning stage of any writing project. If a character has a medical condition or lives in a different country than its writer originated from or has lived in, then a lack of research is not only unprofessional, but also has the possibility of being unrealistic and/or insensitive. Encouraging writers to learn more about different subjects that they are interested in writing in only leads to the writer and their audiences becoming more informed. Research can also always be done at a subjective level. A writer who is writing a character who has a near-death experience may want to consult people who have had a near-death experience or to find sources in which someone who has had a near-death experience has written about it and their life after the fact.

 

 

No matter how much research you do, you should also make sure to have plenty of beta-readers to look over your work after you have finished your draft. A beta-reader is someone who readers over an unpublished or unfinished piece of fiction and makes notes about what does and doesn’t work about the draft. If you write about an experience that you personally have not had, it is extremely helpful to have at least one or two beta-readers who have personally had similar experiences to the ones you’ve written about. This can especially help to make sure that your portrayal is accurate.

 

 

I suppose the reason that “write what you know” has never appealed to me because of how restrictive it feels. I think some better advice is to a) do thorough and comprehensive research and b) write the stories you want to read. Sure, these pieces of advice together are three times as long as “write what you know,” but that’s a small cost in consideration of the freedoms offered by the alternative.