Misunderstood Quotes from Famous Authors – “Write What You Know.”
A popular essay I wrote back in 2013. Let's see if it still holds up!
One of the greatest things an author can do, especially a master of the craft, is pass on the information they’ve learned to the next generation of writers. Unfortunately, some of these famous and oft-quoted pearls of wisdom have suffered widespread misunderstanding.
Queue the dreaded four words:
“Write what you know.”
The above is sometimes attributed to Mark Twain, although this quote is untraceable and likely predates Twain by quite a bit.
But it’s perhaps the most classic writing adage we’ve got, one of the first quotes you’ll likely stumble across when researching storytelling, and rightfully so.
However this advice can be maddening, especially to a frustrated fledgling looking to get started with some easy-to-follow tips.
People in writing communities can get strangely livid about this one. I’ve seen covers of writing magazines ask, “Should We Really Write What We Know?”
Author John Irving (2012) was quoted as saying, the “write-what-you-know dictum has no place in imaginative literature.”
Writing professors famously misinterpret this quote and tell their students to ignore it entirely.
But why?
Possible misinterpretations:
You must telegraph your exact life experiences into your writing.
All fictional stories are just autobiographies in disguise.
It’s impossible to write science fiction, fantasy, or even period pieces about the distant past if you only ‘write what you know’, therefore it’s safe to dismiss this advice in “imaginative literature”.
You’re not allowed to write about things you’ve never experienced — ex: Don’t write about a P.I. if you’re not a career detective. Don’t write about surgery if you’re not a surgeon.
The Intended Meaning
Write what you know is about taking your life experiences and channeling them as if you were method acting.
Sometimes this advice is meant to be taken more literal. For example, having visited Japan and climbed Mt. Fuji, I was able to channel those personal experiences when writing Obscura.
But there’s something far more practical to this advice as well:
Ever been yelled at? How did it make you feel?
Ever yelled at someone? Stolen something? Dealt with a bully?
Ever been at the unfair end of an unfair decision?
Know what it’s like being destitute? Homeless?
Let’s say you realize one of your characters must die, and this loss is going to be tough for everyone involved.
Maybe you’ve never experienced the loss of someone close to you. But you can channel the saddest moments you can think of and let those emotions spill onto the page.
If you’ve never ridden a horse a day in your life but your characters deal with horses on a regular basis, it wouldn’t hurt to do a little research and spend some time with real life horses.
But if there’s no convenient way for you to experience horseback riding firsthand, no worries. You can take what you already know and use that instead. Maybe you’ve taken care of a household pet, maybe you have knowledge about riding a motorcycle, or know what it feels like to have the wind whip through your hair.
Certainly you’ve seen movies where people are tending and riding horses, right? That’s familiarity, that’s research, that’s knowledge.*
Just as you can set a story in Great Britain without having ever been there, or can write a story about World War II even if you weren’t alive to see it, you can write about riding horses without having ever ridden one yourself.
But why not find a beta reader you trust that does have a lot of experience with horses? If they teach you what they know, then you’ll know it, too. And you can use that knowledge to fuel your writing going forward.
Contrary to the John Irving quote mentioned earlier, “Write what you know” is perhaps the single most important and powerful piece of writing advice available. And that goes for both fiction and non.
Creating a fantasy world requires verisimilitude and a careful balance to suspend disbelief. These emotions, these life experiences, writing what you know, will be the glue that holds your world together, making the less believable seem far more real.
So it’s not about writing your specific life experiences, (otherwise all my characters would be males who grew up in a small-town-Reaganomics-1980′s-Midwest-US household), it’s about writing all manner of things while using your past experiences to your advantage.**
It can be the keystone in making sure your stories stay believable – even if they’re grounded in unreality.
And best of all, it teaches us writers to pay more attention to the world around us. If we want our writing to improve, we must always keep learning.
All that in just four words.