What Do You Know?
And why on Earth would you want to write about that?
If there is advice for the young writer more often misunderstood than “write what you know” I don’t know what it is.
This adage is not inherently terrible, but it is incomplete, bordering on lazy, and once you’ve had time to ponder it, this starts to feel intentional. Imagine if half the Ten Commandments consisted merely of “Thou Shalt Not” without explanatory detail. Shalt not what? You’d have to suspect God was messing with you.
But this is what young writers are told, ad nauseum, and in fairness, it does work.
For some people.
John Grisham earned a law degree, which gained him inside knowledge of court rooms and the legal system. Ken Kesey worked a night shift as a nursing assistant on a psych ward, did time in prison, and volunteered for CIA-financed, government-run experiments with hallucinogenic drugs, including LSD and peyote, all of which may have had a little something to do with his writing One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Herman Melville worked on a whaler, Mark Twain as a pilot on a riverboat, and Kurt Vonnegut survived the bombing of Dresden in a slaughterhouse marked number five. While serving as a nurse in World War I, Agatha Christie learned everything she knew about poisons. Richard Hooker (Richard Hornberger), author of MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors, was [spoiler] an Army doctor during the Korean War. Andy Weir’s hobbies include orbital mechanics, astronomy, and the history of human spaceflight.
Write what you know worked out great for them, but perhaps it’s less suited for us mortals. I don’t want to go to law school or prison and I’d prefer not to be captured by Germans and fire-bombed, thank you very much. This is why god gave us fantasy novels and science fiction with very little science. I have a strong suspicion this is also why there are so many novels whose protagonists are fiction writers, often struggling with writer’s block.
Write what you know.
What do you know?
For writers making their very earliest efforts, understanding what you know is a reasonable place to start. Maybe you do have experience with the criminal justice system or medicine or military service that you might like to use in fiction. Good for you!
As an exercise – and warm-up for more interesting inquiries to come – make a list of things you know. For now, stick with the literal interpretation of knowledge. If you need to narrow this down, try this: If you were to teach a class on something, what would it be? Is there a topic or field of information that prompts you to nerd out? If you were training a new co-worker, what could you tell them? Certainly Agatha Christie could have taught a Poisons 101 class.
If you were writing your biography, which parts would be the most interesting? Perhaps you have an unconventional job experience or esoteric talent, or have done important work on a social justice cause, as John Gresham has with the Innocence Project. You probably have a few skills or topics about which you have stored away a wealth of information. You may not have a law degree in your back pocket but you must have something.
Any gravediggers out there? Master seamstresses or bakery chefs? Jugglers, ventriloquists, magicians? Botanists, biologists, or scientists of any kind? Art historians, librarians?
Find something to brag about. Imagine this knowledge makes you one of the world’s most fascinating people. What would you say to Oprah? Write it down, even if you think it’s embarrassing. No one will read it.
Why isn’t this enough?
If you haven’t figured it out, a literal interpretation of write what you know will take your writing only so far. Writers – or maybe it was just me – may mistake write what you know with writing about information or about events that actually happened to us. We may think we are supposed to write about facts or that our characters should have the same jobs as we do, the same family makeup, the same ethnicity or background.
We look at great works of fiction and wonder “But how did he know that?” Of course we are curious about how and where other writers come by their ideas. Why wouldn’t we be?
If your list of what you know feels sparse, join the club. My next post is My Turn, and believe me, my list won’t be anything to write about.
Fortunately, we all know much more than we realize.