Write What You Know
Here's a video follow-up to our blog post on the old writing adage "write what you know." A closer look at what this expression really means and how you can make it work in your writing.
Ready to take your writing to the next level? Don’t miss our intensive writing program for Novel, Memoir, and Picture Book writers.
Transcript for Write What You Know Video
Hello. This is Mary Kole with Good Story Company. And I'm here to talk about this writing adage of "write what you know."
We had a blog post about it on the Good Story blog a little while ago and, you know, we got some questions that I thought were a little bit funny, like for example, you know, from writing historical fantasy, "How do I write what I know?" And, I think, sometimes, this advice is taken a little bit too literally and so, I wanted to talk about it in the context of what I feel it really means and how it can really contribute to your writing in a way that makes sense.
So, to me, "write what you know" really means take the emotional truth that you know and your experience and put that into a story, rather than... I'm an editor and I sit on a computer all day. And, you know, if I only wrote characters who were sort of in that world, doing that, and that was the only thing that sort of made it onto the page, I think that would be a rather limited application of the "write what you know" advice. But I would say that if we sort of take some of these elements off the table, in terms of I can only write about somebody who lives in this city, I can only write about somebody who does this for a vocation, I can only da da da da da. If we take some of that away, what do we have left?
And I think that is really at the heart of this advice, which is the common human elements that I've experienced that you've probably experienced in your life, for example, joy, sadness, grief. All of these things that I may have put my own slant on as a human being, as a personality, you know, I'm a little bit stubborn, for example. I like to think I'm funny. And so, that's the slant I may have put on my experiences. But at the end of the day, I can draw on those experiences and filter them for the purposes of creating the character, for the purposes of creating events in a life.
Of course, there are gonna be times when you want to write about somebody who is not an editor living in Minneapolis, which is sort of my demographic profile, where you may have to beef up your work with research. For example, if I wanted to write about a pediatric nurse. I'd never lived that life but I would love to talk to one and find out the specifics, the particulars. Like our historical fiction question that we got on a "write what you know" blog post, we would absolutely want to beef up and put scaffolding around our ideas with research, especially since we don't time travel or at least I don't. I don't know about you.
But a lot of the things that come from that "write what you know" advice are applicable in terms of can I find common ground with my character? Can I find common experiences with my character? I can add a truth to those experiences just based on the truths that I've lived in my life. It doesn't necessarily have to be quite so literal.
That being said that there are a lot of conversations right now about lived experience and who can write what, based on their lived experience. For example, if I don't have the lived experience of a character who is not cisgendered, do I write a protagonist in that vein? So that is a whole other conversation to have about this "write what you know" concept. And we actually have this great video from Erin Entrada Kelly meeting with our Story Mastermind group and really dissecting it so please check that video out if this topic interests you.
But, I think, sometimes, this "write what you know" advice doesn't have to limit you because what you know isn't just who you are, what you know has a lot of basic human truth to it that you could also bring to the table when you're rendering your character's experience on the page. So that's how I would impart that advice.
My name is Mary Kole with Good Story Company. Here's to a good story.
For serious writers ready to take their work to the next level, Story Mastermind is a proven program that helps you refine your craft and position your writing in the market. In just six months, you can finish your draft, get professional edits, and develop a plan to launch your book—all in an intensive small-group workshop environment. There’s nothing else like it in the writing world.
