Write What You Know

A while ago I wrote a blog post about my top 8 creative writing rules to follow. Rule 8 was ‘write what you know’. This is what I wrote about it at the time: This has to be the most common creative writing rule there is but that’s probably because it’s the most important. Writing what you know doesn’t mean that you have to recreate your life but it does mean you can make your fictional story more realistic and relatable.

I still heartily believe that this rule is a good one. But, after a discussion about fantasy fiction with a friend of mine, I have come to the decision that I should explore this rule in more detail than I did previously.

The discussion began because my friend expressed the opinion that you can’t write fantasy fiction if you only write what you know. This is true. If you only write what you know, it limits you somewhat. But my rule isn’t ‘only write what you know’ and maybe I should have been clearer about that at the time.

Whilst writing fantasy fiction, it would be very hard to make the events, setting and even possibly the characters close to anything you’ve encountered in real life. However, you can base your character’s back stories and relationships on what you have experienced.

Maybe you lost someone close to you when you were young. You know how that feels, so you can write it better than others who haven’t experienced it. So maybe your character could have lost someone close to them. Or maybe you have a relationship with someone who is distant and closed off. Your character could encounter a similar person on their travels. Even snatching small things from your day to day life, like the way your mum laughs or the colour of your friend’s hair, and placing it into your fantasy world can make it feel more realistic.

Say you’re writing a story set during WWII. No matter how much we interview those who were around at the time, it is very unlikely that any of us will have a clear view of how it really felt to live through that period. But rather than focusing on things you’ve never experienced, like air raids and concentration camps, you could choose to focus on things you know about that also happened in the 1940s. Loss, fear, uncertainty: they’re all things we’ve experienced. We know how they feel so we can apply our memories of feeling the same way to what we are writing.

So, as my friend pointed out, maybe my rule 8 should be reworded to read something along the lines of 'write from what you have experienced', rather than write what you know. You can always apply your own life experiences to the writing of any genre, even if what you’re writing is set in a world completely different to ours. You can always use your memories to shape your world and your characters to give them more depth and realism.

Thanks for reading.