Write What You Know
We’ve all heard it in one writing workshop or another: “Write what you know.” What does that even mean?
Though well known, a pitfall of the saying is that it’s so vague. It can feel like an attempt to limit creativity. Wait a second! That doesn’t make sense. You write to discover new places. You write to understand different points of view in ways you never could in real life. If you only write what you know, how can you write about what you don’t know? What if your life isn’t that interesting?
It’s a common misconception that you have to live the story to write about it (also known as an issue book), which leads to further confusion. Now your writing is further limited because “that’s how it really happened!” When you write only what happened, you might miss what works for your story.
Didn’t I have “write what you know” on a college bumper sticker?
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THE MAGIC OF WRITING
Guess what? You are the writer. You get to do whatever you want! That’s the magic of the craft. You don’t have to capture exact moments, which can steer you too close to your manuscript. To effectively use personal experience, you can distance yourself by changing some of the facts. Chronology and location can change. Even the characters and narrator can change. If you’ve always wished an event in your past had gone differently, or regretted a decision, you’re in luck! Fiction can change everything.
“Write what you know” really boils down to sharing the truths of your human experience.
Your feelings matter. Your subjective understandings matter. They’re the keys to making your writing feel real. Even if you live a sedentary life in a small town with nothing to do, your emotional connection to readers is what will reel them in and keep them hooked.
Writing that’s both relatable and specific reduces psychic distance, which is your control over how much your audience identifies with a character. For example, loss is a universal experience, but how you felt the loss of your particular loved one is what’s going to bring integrity to the moment of loss in your writing. What exactly chokes you up adds richness and empathy more than ‘telling’ statements and generalizations. It’s the difference between:
I was devastated that he was gone. We used to love playing chess together, and now the set sat untouched on the coffee table.
and
The chess set collected dust on the coffee table, forever suspended in the game we’ll never get to finish. But putting it away meant admitting he was gone.
Infuse your writing with your emotions and the meaning you’ve attached to them, and you’ll establish that common ground with your audience.
HOW MUCH YOU SHOULD KNOW
That depends on the category or genre in which you’re writing. “Write what you know” can be misused to mistake one category for another, such as inserting autobiographical details into fiction. The only time you should absolutely aim for the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth is if you’re writing an actual autobiography.
You might be writing an autobiography, but it’s unlikely. Unless you’re Michelle Obama, but even she elected to write in the much more marketable memoir category. In memoir, many of the emotions and events will be the same, but you might change when it happened to better organize a story arc. In fiction, everything might be completely different except for the nucleus of an emotional event you’ve experienced bringing a scene to life.
So when you write what you know, don’t focus on literal accuracy. Ask yourself if it’s relatable, and then figure out how it fits into the story. Writing is an act of creation, so flex your creative muscles and make it your own. What you know is the heartbeat of your work, that seed of truth proving you’re not some robot in a person suit. You’re building a bridge of human empathy and connection between yourself and your reader. Beyond that, there’s so much more to discover.
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