"Write What You Know": Bad Advice?

I took a lot of creative writing classes in college. And over and over again, in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfic classes, I received the same advice from professors: write what you know. I heard this over and over. If I wrote about something beyond my experience, I was sometimes told I was overreaching—and I heard friends and classmates being told the same thing. Often, I was told to dial it back—to reach within my own experience for ideas.

I think this can be great advice—but also very limiting advice. Too limiting if you take it literally. And it depends on the type of writing you’re doing. For instance, I write both poetry and novels. My novels are all over the place—I write fantasy, romance, historical(ish) fiction, and the occasional YA. None of my storylines are ever based on my own life.

However, in poetry, almost everything I write is personal. I write a lot of love poetry. A lot of poetry about my own feelings and emotions in different situations. With a few exceptions, my poetry isn’t about politics or nature or the general human condition—it’s about me.

In general, I think sticking to “write what you know” is a great way to get started writing. If you’re struggling to find your voice, to figure out what to write about, and you’re new to the process, chances are that something near to you is going to inspire you and draw out an authentic voice. It also takes away the tricky issue of research—you are automatically an expert in you, so it’s easy to write about that.

However, once you’ve done that a bit—I did quite a bit of self-referential short-story-writing before starting my novels—I think it’s good to branch out. The imagination should be as free as it was in childhood to explore whatever fascinates and compels you. Whether that’s life on other planets, the minds of serial killers, or the life of Tiberius Gracchus. If all writers wrote only what they knew, we would have no speculative fiction. We would have no historical fiction. A whole host of genre fiction would evaporate.

However, within a genre—no matter how otherworldly—you can use what you know to enrich and deepen the world. You can use your own emotional experience to make your characters stronger. You can draw characters, dynamics, and sometimes situations from your own life. I think that’s a great strategy.

But the roles of imagination and research are just as important—and I suppose that if you add in personal experience, these are the three legs of the tripod of amazing writing. I like to think of amazing writing as a tripod. Sturdy when you get the balance right—tipsy when one leg is longer than the other.