The One Common Piece of Writing Advice You Should Ignore
‘Write what you know’ leaves little space for imagination
Write what you know.
It is probably the most popular piece of writing advice. Every day, at workshops and college classrooms across the land, this axiom is drilled into aspiring writers as if it were gospel. It is not. In fact, it is dead wrong.
Don’t write about what you know. Write about what you want to know. There is a world of difference. Writing about what you know is stale and predictable. Writing about what you want to know is fresh and unexpected.
What excites writers, the good ones, is not knowledge but the search for it. It is this thoroughly conscious ignorance, and the fierce desire to vanquish it, that gets me out of bed each morning.
I’ve written four books: on happiness, spirituality, creative genius, and philosophical wisdom. When I started each project, I knew little about these topics. By the time I finished, I knew a lot more.
Did I become an “expert” on these subjects? Perhaps, but I don’t like to use that word. Writers are not experts. In many ways, they are the opposite.
The expert knows more and more about less and less; the writer knows more and more about more and more. The…
