What do people think of the old saying 'Write What You Know' ?
Do you think writing from real experience adds credibility or do you think we should trust our imaginations?

The most common argument against this is: "well I write Sci-fi, so how can that relate to me?"

Yes it can, because if you use your own experience and project that into a fantasy world (including sci-fi, horror and historical fiction here) it will give the fictionalised world a realistic tethering point.

For example, a space opera told from the POV of a high priestess is going to be pretty much fiction throughout, but a space opera told from the POV of the guy who looks after the high priestess could be so much more interesting if the author has a history as a PR consultant, and really knows the problems that go hand in hand with looking after a celeb.

Colin M

I think the motto is 'Write about what you can make me believe you know.' In other words, what you know is the gold-standard for how seemingly authentically you can write something. You just have to learn to write that high priestess, or the slums of ancient Rome, or an inuit igloo, so that I believe you know it, and how all the characters feel and think and act - both authentic-seeming to their time, and convincing to me - as well as you know your own high street.

Emma

Which is why people talk about researching a novel, so that when they come to write it, they are writing about what they know.

Well I always say, if you don't know it, make up something that sounds plausible, because 99.9% of your readers won't know it either, or at the very least will be willing to suspend disbelief if you make them believe you believe it.

As Steven King says, good writers have to be good liars.
He also says readers want to know what goes on at work. So, eg. Grisham fans like to read about lawyers, True Crime readers like details on police proceedure, Sci-fi you can make up but it has to sound more techno-logical than Fantasy. The more authentic sounding the details the better.

- NaomiM

I'b sometimes researched something historical - language, particularly - and realised that it may be genuine, but I can't use it because no one will believe me, and it'll jar as much as if I'd got it wrong. 'Seeming authenticity' has to be the goal: true authenticity is impossible anyway, and sometimes a mistake.

And Colin's absolutely right: you have to leave the research behind, internalise it till it is something you know. There's nothing you'll write worse than what you write with the text book in the other hand.

Emma

Gore Vidal once said that 'write what you know' is the advice given to people who can't write. Which may be typical of him, but I was a very impressionable young man, dreaming of being a writer, when I heard him say it and it made me think, and stuck in my mind.

For me there are two contrary purposes to writing. One is to get out what is inside me - so that is a question of writing about what I know. The other seemingly contradictory purpose is to imagine the consciousness of 'the other'. Somehow both aspects seem natural and human - to try to share how you experience the world and how you feel about it, and to try to understand how others do the same.

At the end of the day, I wonder if it is even possible to write about things you DON'T know. Doesn't everything we express in writing somehow draw on things we've heard, seen, smelled, felt at sometime in our life and that have been saved in some file in the depths of our consciousness? I suppose you can create a fictional story-line and invent fictional locactions, but the essence of that which brings them to life comes from our own experience.
I don't know if that makes sense...
Robin

I agree. Almost everything you write gives away teeny tiny bits of information about you as a person.

Almost everything you write gives away teeny tiny bits of information about you as a person.

Yes, I think that's true, though I think often only you would recognise it. Though sometimes other people recognise what you haven't seen yourself.

I think what a writer is often doing is extrapolating from themselves to others, or taking what they know and changing one thing - the true experimental method. 'What if I'd found myself living in this Guatemalan hill village and I didn't get on with my husband?' 'What if my aged aunt hadn't died, and our home had been repossessed?' 'What must it have been like, being dyslexic in the 17th Century Danish court?' (See Music & Silence - Rose Tremain does very little research, interestingly.) Or whatever.

Emma

I think it's possible to do it either way. But if you write from what you know already, there is less danger that the research will 'show' than if you have to do loads of reading and digging for the background. And it's way easier for lazy people like me!

Rosy

I suppose I'm always trying to give away as little of myself as possible...

Besides, isn't writing what you don't know as if you do - voices, places, feelings - nine-tenths of the technical fun of writing a novel? Or am I just a masochist?

Emma

What do people think of the old saying 'Write What You Know' ? Do you think writing from real experience adds credibility or do you think we should trust our imaginations?

Hi Helen,

I found that in writing what I knew, once I got started I realised I didn't know so much as I'd thought I did.

To be serious though, in my case there are aspects of 'what I know' that cause me extreme difficulty, even distress. So I don't write about those things. I started once, but it was no use.. I couldn't carry on with it. So there was another one for 'the sock drawer'.

Regards
John



<Added>

Something I meant to add...
I know the sound of a shotgun. but do you think I can describe it? The best I could come up with was, 'The flat boom' of the discharge! That's nowhere near how it sounds!

For sure though, it isn't Phuttt! :)
Regards
John

'Write what you know' and 'write from your own personal and lived experience' aren't the same thing, are they? After all, there's a lot I know from reading books, watching the telly, listening to the radio, talking to friends, family and colleagues, and simply being an observant participant in life. So I have knowledge about a lot of things I haven't actually experienced.

Once again I think this is one of those guidelines that isn't meant to be taken too literally.

I wrote my first novel about a drama group because after forty odd years in the 'business' I had the background. The theatre was, therefore, simply a vehicle for my characters who I suppose might just have easily belonged to a golf club. I'm now halfway through a book based around a dating agency...and I ran one of those for three years, so I suppose it just makes life easier to write about what I know. I don't consider it a cop out, but it is an easy way to get authenticity without monnths of research.
Suzanne