You’ve heard it before – “Write what you know.” In this episode, we’re going to challenge this advice. We’ll dig deeper into what it really means to write what you know. And I’ll give you my 3 tips on how you can transform details from your life into powerful fiction and memoir.

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Big Takeaways

“Write what you know” is one of the most common and poorly understood writing rules out there. We’ve heard it so many times, many of us take it for granted.

But here’s where I see writers get tripped up: [01:13]

They write exactly what happened, play by play. Or they’re exhaustively descriptive, cluttering their scenes with objects simply because they were there in the room. We just can’t seem to go beyond the literal truth.  We might have a hard time selecting and re-imagining what happened.

Or we convey just the facts, the surface events, without diving into the deeper layers of character.

Writing what you know, basing your work on autobiographical material, can be restrictive. That’s because we find it hard to stop ourselves from being true to the experience, even when it doesn’t serve the story we want to tell.

Yet, we can’t help but write what we know. Even when we’re creating fiction out of whole cloth, it’s virtually impossible to stop real life from seeping into our pages.

Writing what we know sounds simple. But it’s deceptively complex.

What does it mean to write what you know? [2:40]

Writing what you know isn’t about piling on details and facts.

It's your frustrations, your obsessions, your pain -- all those things you're still trying to figure out. All those things that continue to have you in their grip.

Emotional truth [3:05]

The "what you know" is what you know to be true, valuable and meaningful about the world.

Imagination. Not Transcription. [6:24]

Write what you know as well as what you can imagine. Filter what you know through your imagination.

Write towards what you don't know. [12:28]

Writing what you know refers, among other things, to the wisdom you or your character accumulates throughout the events and experiences your story traces.

Memorable Quotes

“Not-knowing is not a form of ignorance, but a difficult transcendence towards knowledge.” ~ Gaston Bachelard

“The fact is writing -- writing a letter, a memoir or a novel --requires some artifice. The act of writing down memories changes them. They become more real. The line blurs between actual memory and reconstructed written memory so that the writer is less and less able to know for certain what really happened.” ~ Robin Hemley