Write What You Know

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: Write what you know.

I’ve always hated that advice. If you ask me to cite the worst advice to give a writer, it’s that. No hesitation. That is the worst advice I’ll ever hear someone give a writer. I say that because the first time I remember someone telling it to me, I was maybe sixteen or seventeen, and even then, I could smell the bullshit wafting up from where it landed flat at my feet.

“I’m writing about a fantasy world that doesn’t exist,” I wondered at the time. “How am I supposed to ‘know’ about it?”

For me, telling an author to write what they know is about as useful as telling someone to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. It seems like good advice, but if you actually try doing it, you’re going to find yourself lacking. In case you’re not in the know, the “bootstrap” proverb originated as a way to describe absurdity. If you sit down on your rump and try to lift yourself by tugging on the loop over the heel of your boot, you’re not going anywhere (Curzan).

At the same time, if you just “write what you know,” you’re going to end up writing a memoir and maybe some non-fiction books about your job.

So, Why Do We Perpetuate Bad Advice?

I have my theories. If you sit and think about the words and dig into them, you can find a nugget of wisdom – you just can’t be literal about it. That realization really struck home with me when I first read Characters & Viewpoints by Orson Scott Card. In the book, Card talks about Michael Bishop and his 1988 novel, Unicorn Mountain, where Bishop, presumably heterosexual, has to get into the head of his character, Bo Gavin, a gay man dying of AIDs and living in exile. So, how does a heterosexual man write about a gay character? Analogy. He asked, “What would it be like to be this person?” Then he looked at what he did know and extrapolated from there, drawing on analogy when necessary. (Card p.30)

The saying shouldn’t be “write what you know.” The saying should be “put what you know into your writing.”

Putting What You Know into Your Writing

Let’s break it down. Let’s say we’re writing a scene for a science fiction novel in which an alien spaceship suddenly appears above Earth and falls, crashing into the ocean off the coast of Florida. That’s a pretty out-there event, and it’s safe to say no one reading this has experienced it before. Now, because you’re marketing your story as Science Fiction, see my article on Genre, your readers are already going to be primed to suspend some disbelief. However, you still want verisimilitude in your writing – you want it to feel authentic.

So … what are the grounded, real things you can extrapolate from your own experiences to create the scene of how people react to this wild occurrence? Maybe you,

• Are from or lived along the Florida coast and know how people living there react to strange or sudden occurrences,
• Had an experience where something strange and unexpected suddenly showed up, and you couldn’t explain why,
• Experienced a plane crash or other large vehicle crash, or, alternatively, experienced a boat wreck and know the particular challenges and side effects of such an occurrence in the water,
• Are not from Florida, but you are from an area where fish sometimes fall from the sky during a violent storm … yes, this really does happen (Science Questions), so you know what it’s like when someone just doesn’t believe you about a phenomenon you’ve experienced – or you just know what it’s like when things shouldn’t fall from the sky but do,
• Remember the devastation of Katrina and other major hurricanes (a ship crash landing could cause catastrophic damage to the coastal area),
• Remember the ecological devastation from the Deep Water Horizon disaster.

Once you have your analogous experience, think about the different questions you can ask about the experience to help you map out what might happen when an alien ship suddenly crashes off the coast of Florida. As the important questions of the experience you had: how, what, why, when, where, and who. Then ask the questions that will help you dig into the experience and find the analogy: Oh, really? What if? But did they? If you need to, add in twists and exaggerations to find where your analogy meets the reality of your story.

It’s Not Just Fantasy and Science Fiction

You can apply this practice of putting what you know into your writing to any kind of fiction writing. It’s not just a way to help you write grounded Fantasy and Science Fiction stories. In college, I wrote a Romance short story, Lila, where the female lead had diabetes. I don’t. But I do have asthma, so I know what it is to live with having to always prepare for “what if the chronic condition I live with suddenly flares up?” as part of my normal getting ready for a date routine.

What’s more, the diabetes never becomes a conflict in the story. It’s just part of what the character has to live with and consider in her daily life. It’s what it is to live with a chronic health condition. Understanding these things, that even when a chronic health condition doesn’t flare up, it’s still part of that person’s life and always has to be planned for, helps to ground a character and your story.

So, when it comes to writing from your experiences, consider,

1. What event or character do I want to write about?
2. Do I have knowledge or experiences that can inform my writing?
3. Do I have different experiences that may have similarities I can draw on?
4. Ask the questions: Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How
5. Challenge the questions: Oh yeah? What if…? But did they?
6. Add twists and exaggerations as needed

Remember, no writing technique is perfect. This is an approach you can take to imagining experiences you’ve never had. It should go alongside research you do, looking for non-fiction examples of people sharing their own experiences to add to your catalogue of knowledge.

Writing Prompt

The Plot Hook: A character turns on the radio and hears a new song – #1 Hit – but they recognize the lyrics as a poem they wrote in college and shared in a class. They never gave anyone permission to use the poem. What do they do? It’s every writer’s worst fear, come to life for this character.

Genre: Choose one of the following Genres:

• Romance
• Thriller
• Science Fiction

Write a scene or two using the Plot Hook, in one of the above three Genres. Draw on something of your own experience to help you determine how the character reacts to the situation and what the character does in response.

Sources:
Card, Orson Scott. Elements of Fiction Writing – Characters & Viewpoint. Writer’s Digest Books, 1999
Curzan, A. (2023, November 14). Just try that with your bootstraps. The Chronicle of Higher Education. https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/just-try-that-with-your-bootstraps
Science Questions With Surprising Answers. “Can It Rain Fish?”, April 30, 2013. https://www.wtamu.edu/~cbaird/sq/2013/04/30/can-it-rain-fish/