“Write What You Know About, Myth or Magic?
--An Expert's Step-by-Step Guide”
Think you can write only about what you know? Here's the secret!
by Steve Manning
Somewhere in your past you’ve been told you should write only about what you know, what you’ve experienced first hand, what you’ve seen with your eyes and, hopefully, done with your hands.
The reason this sounds like good advice is that by following it you’re more than likely to bring great gobs of authenticity to writing your book. If you’ve lived in Butte, Montana, then you have an excellent idea of what Butte looks like, how people act, whether there’s yellow lines or white lines down the center of the main street, that sort of thing.
The reader has a much better chance of being placed right in the situation that has been created for them by the writer.
At least, that’s how the theory goes. And, at least on the surface of it, it sounds pretty logical. It’s tough for a reader to argue with your description of the interior of the Apollo Lunar Module if you’ve sat in one personally and took copious notes.
But the logic is flawed on so many levels that by following this advice when you write your book, you could actually be limiting your ability, limiting your scope, limiting what you can actually write about and drastically reducing the excitement for the reader.
Let’s start with the most obvious challenge. There are certain genres, notably science fiction and westerns, where you simply couldn’t have experienced the situation. Time and space geography have made it impossible. You can’t recreate the sights, scents and subtleties of a cattle drive, or an 1870 brothel, from first-hand experience, no matter how hard you tried. You weren’t there. You didn’t live it. No amount of research can replace that. In these two situations, and in countless others, you can’t write from your personal experience and so, if you’re true to the writing maxim, you can’t write about what you know, because you don’t ‘know’ anything.
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Come to think of it, most fiction goes out the window depending on how aggressively you want to adhere to this strategy. And non-fiction isn’t far behind.
If you write only about what you know, you’re pretty much stuck with writing your biography… over and over again. And even then this is only your version of the events. How often have you heard someone, other than the story teller, say, “Well, that’s not how I remember it…” and their remembrance is completely different.
So let me set your mind at ease. You can write about anything you want. If it’s fiction, it’s a story, a made-up story. A mental fabrication. The story is the thing. Everything else is just details. Events occur and the characters react to the events, moving the story along. And, no matter who they are, characters based on people will always react in pretty much the same way. And if you’ve got a half decent imagination, you can just about everything you need to and be pretty accurate about it.
W.P. Kinsella, author of Shoeless Joe (on which the movie Field of Dreams was based) has said numerous times you don’t have to commit suicide to understand suicide. He has also said all he needs is to know about two pieces of flora and two examples of fauna and he can create a setting without any problem.
As if to prove it, he’s written several works about First Nations life and has been congratulated several times on his precise depiction of life on a reservation. Sheepishly, Kinsella admits he’s never spent any time on any reservation. It all came from his mind.
Write about what you feel comfortable writing about. Whether you’ve lived it personally isn’t important. It’s the story that’s essential.
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Time for a little unabashed, self promotion: If you haven’t asked for my Free CD, “How to Write a Book On Anything in 14 Days Guaranteed!” then you’re just plain nuts! It’s free, no charge, but you can bet this $100 CD will be carrying that price tag very shortly. How do you get it? Just email me at Free CD, Please, or CD_please@writeabooknow.com and make sure you include your name, your mailing address and your telephone number in the email.
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