Is It Really “Write What You Know”?

Many bits of advice can be tracked nowadays concerning writing. Arguably, the most famous piece of writing advice is "Write what you know," which is generally attributed to Mark Twain. Unfortunately, this piece of writing advice is given more often and misunderstood. Obviously, if you take it only from your personal experience, the advice is inevitably way too restrictive. Hence, if you haven't done something or had it done to you, you wouldn't be able to write about many things, in fact, it would even raise serious ethical questions. For instance, if anyone tried to write about murder and criminal law from their personal experience, a lot of us would be in prison but of course, this isn't the case. John Green didn't need to be a teen with fatal cancer to write The Fault in Our Stars, but as it was displayed in his writing, Green definitely knows something about teens and terminal cancer. J.R.R Tolkien, also, didn’t need to be a hobbit to write Lorde of the Rings, but he invented the hobbits and preceded to write about it. So, does this mean that we should ignore “write what you know” and write about anything? Of course not. It might be best to look at “write what you know” as a positive way of framing “don't write from ignorance”. John Green may have never been a teen with terminal cancer but that wouldn't stop him from researching various types of cancer, understanding support groups, interviewing teens with cancer and their family members. In fact, if he tried writing The Fault in Our Stars without doing any of that legwork, it wouldn't have rung true for anyone and would never have achieved success. Why? because it needed that grounding of real-world facts to make its story ring true and to grab a hold of its audience.

Adding to the above, The American novelist Andy Weir didn’t need to visit Mars to write The Martian, but it’s clear that he knows a good deal about Mars biology, the physics of space travel, and the problems of surviving in space. As a matter of fact, even the stuff he made up is believable and does not suspend the reader's sense of belief. We can see from these examples that one way to get over the hurdle of “write what you know” is to expand the base of your knowledge, in other words, “do your research”.

My answer to the question in the title above is simply to find a more effective strategy, aka "know what you write" by heart, rather than “write what you know”. This implies that it is important to gain an understanding of the subjects you are addressing even if you lack familiarity with them. By doing that, you can write confidently and genuinely when discussing topics beyond your usual scope. There’s no denying that writing what you know is a fundamental starting point for doing a work of originality, but sometimes no one cares about what you know. Just as Toni Morrison says, “People say to write about what you know, I am here to tell you, no one wants to read that, cause you don’t know anything so write about something you don’t know and don’t be scared” Therefore, I believe that keeping both of the above approaches in mind as a way of thinking through your writing is just, one of a…. kind.

Written by Nada