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Sadly, too many people don’t understand this advice and take it to mean something it doesn’t; since the advice is so vague it is easily misunderstood.
Write what you know isn’t about writing literally of only the things you are familiar with. It’s about taking elements, emotions, experiences from your own life and using your knowledge of that to make your characters’ experiences more realistic. It’s about doing the research on what you don’t know so that you’ll know what it is that you’re writing about. In other words, write what you know is also about educating yourself.
It’s a decent piece of advice but it is interpretive incorrectly by many. It might actually be better to rephrase it, “know what you write.” Or just explain it as, “write what you know. If you don’t know about it, look it up.” Of course, “do the research” is a much more straightforward piece of advice.
This is very important to keep in mind because it’s not just about using your experience to help your writing, but to do the research on the things that you don’t understand or aren’t familiar with. It helps writers because it keeps them from looking incompetent. It also prevents their stories from suffering from the lack of realism, emotion and understanding.
 DamnBlackHeart · Thu Mar 14, 2013 @ 06:41pm · 0 Comments |
