Write what you know. Write what you don’t know. Just write.
52 Week Writing Challenge: Week 3
Write what you know.
It was the advice that almost stopped me from writing at all. It landed like a soggy blanket with a heavy splat right on top of my prospective writing project and killed it dead.
Write what you know is advice that should be handled with care.
It’s often interpreted to mean that new writers should start by writing a story based largely from personal experience. Indeed, there is nothing wrong with this, and many successful novelists start out this way. But write what you know is not very helpful to those of us who find inspiration elsewhere. My life experience is rather ordinary, and doesn’t offer much in the way of raw material.
The last thing I want is to be forced down a route that demands that I start with something semi-autobiographical, and get stuck with a fictional me for company to boot.
I write to escape myself. Writing offers me a space where I’m no longer thinking about the leak under the kitchen sink, or caught up in that unending internal dialogue about whether anything is ever good enough. I put pen to paper and open the door to a world where I can be as bold as I want, and no-one is going to stop me. I can become another person, bring an imaginary city to life or explore an interesting idea just to see where it goes.
Despite all this, there are benefits to writing what you know, at least some of the time. Learning to capture our impressions of an unfamiliar place, someone we have just met or our personal experience of an emotion in words can train us to become more sensitive observers of the world and of ourselves. But at the same time writing what we don’t know challenges us to throw caution to the winds and extend our creative range.
Writing what you know, and writing what you don’t know are not opposites, but complementary parts of the whole. I could be starting with personal experience and embellishing it with imagination, or I could do precisely the opposite. Alternatively, I could find inspiration in research, starting with something I’ve read and digging around a bit more to see whether it leads anywhere.
If all goes well, I should end up with a finished piece that others want to read. This will contain varying amounts of imagination, personal experience and research, depending on what you want to write (this article is mostly my opinion with a dollop of research on the top).
That’s the beauty of writing. There are no rules for how to get there, or what to write along the way. It’s up to you. The novelist David Mitchell wrote three highly imaginative and acclaimed novels, including Cloud Atlas, before turning to the semi-autobiographical Black Swan Green, the tale of a thirteen year old boy with a stammer growing up on an ordinary housing estate.
Every act of fiction is a step into the unknown. Take your inspiration wherever you find it, and whatever you do, remember this:
Write whatever the hell you want to write.
