If you’ve considered yourself any writer for more than approximately one hour, you’ve likely heard that you should be “writing what you know.” I certainly heard it at every step of my writing education, from high school to grad school.
“Write what you know” is super common advice and I understand the intention behind it. If you’re an expert welder or once worked in a public defender’s office, you should definitely write about that stuff because you literally know what it’s like.
You’ve got details, anecdotes, and readymade characters no one else has experienced. Writers should mine from their real lives because it lends authenticity to their writing. Makes sense, right?
However, “write what you know” also implies that if you are not an expert welder and have zero experience as a public defender, you should stop pitching Welding Justice in your general meetings and choose to write something else.
And I am here to tell you that advice is total [expletive deleted]. Here’s why.
What You Know Can (and Should) Change
Before you know something, you tend to learn it—whether through instruction or experience, whether on purpose or not. As writers, we should never stop learning, observing, analyzing, and interpreting.
It might seem obvious that you can add to what you know, but it’s often not—especially if you’re in the throes of an internal debate about what to write. Research takes time, effort, and perseverance, and another project may seem “faster” to write if it doesn’t require you to learn, for example, the basics of how to weld.
However, in my experience, every project has its own special learning curve. Even when I choose to write stories about people and places I am familiar with, I inevitably encounter blocks that require research anyway.
Research and learning—expanding what you know—is an essential part of writing. It helps your characters speak and act with both authority and authenticity. That said…
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It Is More Important To Be an Expert in Human Beings
Writers’ brains often search for every single reason not to write something. If you’re obsessed with Welding Justice, your brain may harp on the valid point that you are not, in fact, a welder or public defender.
But we must remember that stories are not about jobs, skills, and level of education. They are about people—and people are complicated and contradictory.
Audiences yearn for irony and underdogs. The five-star chef who wants to make an upscale beef sandwich. Wildly privileged and wealthy siblings compete for the only thing they cannot buy—their father’s love. The restaurant business and the world of media empires are window dressing to the central stories and relationships in The Bear and Succession. Knowledge of those workplaces is important, but those can be learned.
Human nature—love, fear, bravery, heartache, grief—must be experienced. Luckily, as human writers, this also falls under the umbrella of “what you know.” However, unless you are writing an autobiography, you cannot “know” how your characters will react because your characters are not real. You must imagine them.
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Embrace What You Do Not Know
Imagination is the art of envisioning something that does not exist.
Your characters, because they are not real, can do anything, go anywhere, and even speak in fictional languages.
They can live in a clear fantasy world of warring civilizations with dragons and magic. Or in the seemingly quiet, law-abiding suburbs of Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Storytelling may have structures, but there are no rules. If you go beyond the confines of what you know, you enter the realm of the unknown and that is where discovery happens.
Be Fearless With Your Imagination
Stories without imagination are basically just reports. And those may be informative, but they are not entertaining.
So many amazing stories begin with the simple question, “What if…?” That very question sends you away from “what you know” into the land of what is possible—or even what is impossible—and very quickly it’s clear that “what you know” can be a limitation.
It is precisely the act of confronting what you do not know that leads to breakthroughs and discovery. Brainstorming, dreaming, imagining—thinking outside the metaphorical box of what you know—these activities are vital to the process of writing.
Allow yourself and your characters to explore the unknown. Open yourself to “happy accidents.” Take risks. Be fearless with your imagination.
If you are making discoveries, so is the audience.
An exploratory draft or outline where you push a character into an unknown direction can lead to a discovery that you would never encounter otherwise. Most writers admit that characters eventually tell the writer where they want to go anyway.
So don’t be afraid to follow your characters. It’s their story, after all.
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Who You Are Is More Powerful Than Writing What You Know
If you only remember one thing from this whole post, remember that who you are is more powerful than what you know.
Your instincts, interests, curiosities, emotions—if you choose to follow them, they will drive your stories to places that you cannot possibly predict.
And that’s storytelling—imagining something that intrigues an audience enough to wonder what happens next.
Like, say, a story about a working-class lawyer whose past as a welder informs their unconventional approach to justice.
OK, maybe we should keep brainstorming that one.
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