Everybody’s heard the writing advice “write what you know,” and unfortunately…
…it kind of sucks.
Let’s talk about why, then practice writing things we DO and DON’T know together!
During the last stream, a subscriber requested that we go over why “write what you know” sucks.
1. “Write What You Know” Has a Grain of Truth to It, But…
– When you’re writing a story, it can be a great idea to take something you’re familiar with and put a spin on it
– For example, if you work as a cashier, you can take experiences you’ve had and weave them into a story…
- …like writing a story about a murder mystery at a grocery store and use your experience with coworkers to create suspects
- …or writing a story about a fast food restaurant on a space station and use your experience with customers trying to use (century-long) expired coupons
– Or, best of all, you can use your emotional experience from being a cashier and apply it to something new
- For example, take the frustration that you’ve felt when dealing with a difficult customer and use it to guide you when writing about a magical teenager dealing with her annoying parents:
- Using the excuse of “I’ll check in the back” > I looked at my mom, with her big dumb eyes, after she suggested I simply try “not being magic anymore.” I smiled, nodded, and said, “Sure, Mom. I’ll head to the bathroom and see if I have any anti-magic lotion. Be right back.”
– “Write what you know” can be good to look at your life and use experiences/emotions to guide your writing
– But unfortunately it’s usually given as advice that…
2. “Write What You Know” Limits Your Writing Scope
– When most beginner writers hear “write what you know,” they don’t think about broadly applying their experiences
– Instead, they usually take it to mean “only write about things that you’ve personally experienced” and that’s just wrong
– Authors write about things they haven’t personally experienced all the time, that’s part of what being a writer is all about!
- Patrick Rothfuss wrote about a musician, and gets complimented by musicians all the time… and he’s never played an instrument in his life
- Anthony Weir write about a biologist stranded on Mars, and he got compliments on his scientific accuracy… and he worked as a computer programmer
- Jane Austen wrote Pride and Prejudice, one of the greatest romance novels of all time, when she was 21… and had essentially never been in a relationship before
– As authors, it’s our job to lie, fiction is just a fun/convincing lie
– We lie when we create characters who aren’t real, events that aren’t real, and experiences that aren’t real too
– But it’s our task to make all of them FEEL real, so instead of saying “write what you know,” a better saying is:
- “Write what you don’t know by using what you do know”
– But unfortunately that’s not as catchy or as easy to say
#3. “Write What You Know” Ignores RESEARCH
– Research is one of the most important parts of writing, just the same as editing and actually typing
– We’ve done a whole stream on research before:
– Doing research is how you’re able to write about things you don’t know, by listening to people who DO know about them
- If you want to write about a lawyer and you’re not a lawyer, then research/interview lawyers; if you want to write about a victim of abuse and you’re not a victim of abuse, then research/interview victims of abuse
– Research not only makes your stories more accurate and feel more real, it’s also how you learn new things in life, quite often unexpected things that can make their way into your stories
– Saying only “write what you know” ignores all of that
– Writing is a skill and not everyone has the time to dedicate years of their life to honing it
– That’s where we writers come in
– We may not have experience in certain fields, like lawyering or astronauting or interacting with the opposite sex, but we do have experience WRITING and crafting appealing STORIES
– It’s our job to bring to life stories that we feel are important, regardless of whether we’ve ever personally experienced them
After that we got two random topics from Wikipedia, so that we could learn about things we DON’T know, and sprinkle a few things that we DO know to write them into a story.
The two random articles we got were:
The emotion/experience from our own life we put into the story:
- The stress of being in a foreign country for the first time
Here’s what we wrote:
James Salmon got off the boat at what he’d thought was going to be Vienna, Austria. Interestingly enough, it was far hotter than he’d expected, and the signs at the port were a bit strange too.
“Hmm,” the young Scottish architect said, tapping his chin as he looked around. “I could’ve sworn I’d brushed up on my German, but I suppose the Austrian dialect is quite different. Is that really how you say ‘Vienna’ here?”
Sweating profusely under his woolen winter coat, James walked up to one of the local seamen at the port, cleared his throat and prepared his best German accent.
“Guten tag! Ist dis Wienna?” he asked, very proud of his skills that he’d honed during his voyage here. Unfortunately the native furrowed his hairy brow in confusion and glared up at poor James.
“You wut mate?” he barked in an unfamiliar accent that sounded vaguely English. “Think ya mighta got turn round somewhere.”
James opened his mouth to say something, but then took in his surroundings once more. The summer climate. The humid, salty ocean air. And most of all, the signs that said “Sydney” not “Vienna.”
“Got in himmel,” James said to himself. “I’m in Australia.”
“Now there’s a bright lad,” the seaman said, slapping James on the shoulder. “Now off with ya. Don’t want to become dinna for any dropbears or suckin’ spiders.”
James whimpered in fear and slowly sulked away, wishing that he’d listened to that little voice in his head that had been telling him something was wrong for the past two weeks. He was supposed to be taking an architectural tour of Europe, now that his apprenticeship was over, to bring back news on all the latest trends in Austria, Spain, France and more.
But he’d been so stressed by his first time leaving home, that he’d just stayed put in his cabin, hoping that everything would turn out fine.
Not for the first time in his life, staying silent in his room had turned out disastrous.
But! James was not one to give up quickly either. He was here, now, and he was going to make the best of it. How many Scottish men got the chance to freely visit the other side of the Earth? Not many! And he wasn’t going to waste this chance.
With a pep in his step, and finally removing his winter jacket to hold it overhand, he marched down the boardwalk to The Roo’s Tale. His experienced architect’s eye could tell just from one look that it was a fisherman’s inn. The sign with a kangaroo dipping its tail into the water, nets hanging off it, and rusty anchors decorating the side — there was a lot he could potentially learn here!
And not just The Roo’s Tale, but all the neighboring buildings too. He’d heard tell of Campbell’s Stores, built in the Victorian Gregorian brick-and-seaside style, but he’d never seen them up close and in person. Now that he was here, he could touch them, smell them, lick them even!
Well, maybe not lick them. He didn’t want to accidentally taste any of those poison suckler spiders after all.
Inside The Roo’s Tale, the tavern was practically deserted, aside from the plump barmaid organizing bottles behind the counter. When James stepped in, she turned to him and brushed her seaweed-thick red hair behind her head.
“What’ll it be, mate?” she asked. Then let out a chuckle seeing his jacket. “You want something on ice?”
“Just a room, thanks,” James said. As soon as the words left his lips, the woman laughed.
“Ah, a Scotsman,” she said. “Where’s yer skirt, Yankee?”
James flushed red but held himself tall. Apparently this kind of banter was a part of Austrian, er, Australian culture. Thankfully he was a Glaswegian, and getting pissed was part of his cultural heritage too!
“Well you see, colonial half-wit,” he said, leaning on the counter. “Kilts are from the highlands. We lowlanders, we cover our spears. And unless you want to see why there’s fists on my family’s crest, you’ll give me a room and spare me the bull shite.”
James expected the woman to smile and bite back, but she merely rolled her eyes at him and tossed a set of keys over the bar.
“Room’s at the end and below,” she said. “You might have a roommate though.”
James happily snatched the keys, tossed a few Austrian coins over the counter, and headed to his room feeling quite satisfied with his performance. As he headed past the other rooms, he heard groans and laughs wafting from them, until he descended down the brick staircase to the final door at the end.
Nice of her to give me the cool basement room, he thought to himself. Apparently, he’d made quite the impression on the old lady.
James put in the key and opened the door, taking in his room in all of its cool and slightly damp glory. There was a puffy straw bed, a wooden table and chair with an unlit lantern and…
…a poison suckler spider staring up at him from the floor.
The infernal beast was the size of James’s foot, as it looked up at him with its eight round eyes and twitched its long hairy legs, sizing him up for its dinner. James squeaked in deep Scottish terror, his entire body petrified with fear.
The spider crouched down, mandibles clicking, ready to pounce on James and suck out his blood and organs and whatever else the damned Australian monster would do to him!
“Get yer fat arse outta the way, human!” came a high-pitched shout from behind.
James couldn’t even turn, he only watched as now the spider was the one cowering in fear. Some sort of large rat bounded between his feet at incredible speeds and latched onto the spider’s face with its fangs before the eight-legged horror could even react.
“Mmm!” the new furry creature squealed in delight with its mouth full of hissing spider head. “Thith ith the juthietht one I’ve had thith week!”
Before his eyes, James watched as what looked like a cross between a fox and a rat scarfed down the huge spider one chomp at a time, until it was nothing more than some legs sticking out of the creature’s mouth. With one final swallow, even that went down too, and the fox-rat patted its stomach as it sat satisfied on the floor.
“Thank you for not stomping my breakfast into the floor,” the thing said to James in perfect Australian-accented English. “It tastes better when it’s not smooshed to bits.”
“Um, you’re welcome?” James said back, not sure what was going on. He sure was learning a lot about strange and new Australian culture today. “Thank you for saving my life.”
“Ta mate for distractin’ the land prawn! Those buggers can put up a helluva fight if they see ya comin’. And ta for brekkie.”
“I’ve never met a talking… mouse before,” James said. The creature snapped at him in anger.
“Hold yer tongue, wanker!” it shouted. “I’m a fekkin’ mulgara, not a bloody common mouse! … kinda want to eat a mouse now. Anyway, name’s Muggy, a Crest-tailed mulgara, straight from the Outback.”
“Outback?” James asked. “I’m not an expert in Australian geography, but aren’t you a ways from home, buddy?”
“Well if it wasn’t for your kind, I’d still be at home right now! All you hairless dogs come on in there, bringing yer fekkin’ foxes and cats. They’re suckin’ us out from our burrows like yer grandma sucks eggs.”
James felt his Glaswegian heritage boiling up again, but then an idea hit him.
“Wait a minute. You’re having trouble with your dwellings getting attacked by foxes and cats?”
“By jo, you hairless dogs do got ears after all! I guess you can learn a few new tricks.”
James ignored Muggy’s insults. This was an opportunity, no, the opportunity he’d been waiting for.
“Well it’s just your luck, Mr. Muggy,” James said, straightening himself with pride. “You’re looking at Scotland’s greatest and freshest architect, looking to specialize in high-rise living. You helped me, and I’ll return the favor by showing you how to build homes that no fox nor cat could ever reach.”
Muggy looked up at James, let out a massive belch that reeked of dead spider, then smiled with his furry marsupial face.
“All right, Yankee Wankee,” he said. “You’ve got yourself a deal. Let’s do you up Aussie style.”
If you want to join us and help write a story by trolling in chat, or share your own writing for feedback, then we’d love to have you join us on Twitch.
And you missed the stream, you can still watch them on the YouTube channel or watch the full stream reruns.
Hope to see you next time, friend!
Top image: Pakutaso