Why "Write What You Know" Doesn't Mean What You Think It Does

[image description: a white typewriter on top of a white shag carpet.]

If you’re a writer, you’ve heard the advice to “write what you know” countless times.

There are generally two camps of writers: those who believe you should write what you know, which means drawing inspiration from your own life experiences for your work, and those who believe that advice is ludicrous because the whole point of fiction is to make stuff up, therefore the only people “write what you know” makes sense for is memoirists.

I’m of the belief that every writer draws inspiration from their own life experiences, regardless of the genre they’re writing in or whether they’re conscious of writing autobiographically or not––though obviously, some authors do so more than others. Since the wisdom in writing what you know is readily apparent for memoirists and nonfiction that requires research, for purposes of this post let’s stick to writing fiction as the example.

If fiction writers only wrote what they knew, entire genres wouldn’t exist. Most fantasy, science fiction, and speculative fiction wouldn’t be possible. On the surface, the “write what you know” advice seems ridiculous, especially for those genres.

That’s why “write what you know” doesn’t mean what you think it does. It means you should stay true to the emotion and internal experience, not the literal circumstance.

How can a writer write about loss if they’ve never lost someone they loved? How could they write about falling in love if they’ve never fallen in love? How can you describe emotions you haven’t felt? I don’t believe you can.

That’s what “write what you know” actually means. Regardless of the external details and circumstances, real or imaginary, your writing can only resonate if you write about the internal thoughts and feelings you’ve actually felt. When readers say they related to a book, it’s probably not because they also lived on a spaceship like the protagonist. It means they related to the protagonist’s feelings of isolation, longing, and feeling boxed in while living aboard the spaceship.

If you stay true to the characters’ emotions, you can make any situation believable. So, “write what you know” is actually pretty good writing advice if you read the right meaning into it.