Bad advice

[SamScribble]

My first proper job (many, many years ago) included writing press stories for a management consultancy. We worked in teams, and the team to which I was attached was led by the Director of Strategy. Don was a Chartered Secretary and he held a master’s degree in commerce from a top university. But his passion was for words. Each piece of copy I wrote had to make it across Don’s desk. At some point during his review, he usually asked me the same questions: Would you like to read this? Would it inform you? Would it entertain you?

The ‘standard’ advice to writers – particularly inexperienced writers – tends to be: Write what you know. But most writers don’t really know much. And what they do know is often not particularly interesting. Wouldn't it be more useful to encourage people to write what they would like to read?

Just a thought.

 

[oggbashan]

Write what you know is reasonable advice for absolute beginners starting to write for the first time.

Write about what you know or can find out is better advice for later, but 'tell a story' is more helpful.

 

[KeithD]

My first proper job (many, many years ago) included writing press stories for a management consultancy. We worked in teams, and the team to which I was attached was led by the Director of Strategy. Don was a Chartered Secretary and he held a master’s degree in commerce from a top university. But his passion was for words. Each piece of copy I wrote had to make it across Don’s desk. At some point during his review, he usually asked me the same questions: Would you like to read this? Would it inform you? Would it entertain you?

The ‘standard’ advice to writers – particularly inexperienced writers – tends to be: Write what you know. But most writers don’t really know much. And what they do know is often not particularly interesting. Wouldn't it be more useful to encourage people to write what they would like to read?

Just a thought.

And what they would enjoy researching.

 

[SimonDoom]

"Write what you know" is either great advice or terrible advice. It all depends on how you interpret what it means.

I think the right way to look at it is to see it as empowering rather than restricting. It doesn't mean you can't write about a character who's a welder if you know nothing about welding. What it means is that whether you know it or not you have a stock of feelings and wisdom and memories inside you that you can draw upon when writing, and if you DO draw upon them your writing probably will be more authentic and powerful.

That's not to say you shouldn't stretch yourself.

If Tom Clancy had taken this advice seriously in its restrictive sense, he would never have written a thing, because he had no personal experience with the things he wrote about. No horror writer would get started, because nobody "knows" anything about a werewolf. But one's life experience may provide some interesting material for writing about what a werewolf might do.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

I have always followed the, Write what I would like to read, advice. I also throw a lot of of what I know in there too. And if I don't know, I find out, either via research or I ask someone who knows.

 

[Hypoxia]

Easy: Write what you know.
Not so easy: Write what you want.
More rewarding: Write what you don't know.
Best yet: Write what you neither know nor want.

The last takes you to new territory. It's a challenge, especially making it readable. I neither know nor want incest, so I write it, as puzzles for me. I'm not into BDSM either, so its inclusion takes research. Work, work, work...

 

[ElectricBlue]

I wrote what I knew to start off with, then I wrote places and people I knew to anchor a shaggy-dog story that meandered back and forth in time and place. I wrote an intimate, autobiographical series, then a pair of stories re-imagining a sibling relationship, interspersed with a few reality based one-parters. There's a pattern being established here....

Then I wrote a series set in places I know extremely well (I've lived in them), with one protagonist who was basically a younger me (but doing things I've never done), and the primary character living life as I have never experienced it, not for a second. I received a comment to that one, just last month, thanking us both for sharing, as if that reader believed it was true and the other character was a real person. She's Amelia, and I dare not tell her she's not real (but she isn't).

By that stage I'd learned how to write, and I also thoroughly understood that every piece of my writing, however imaginary it became, however many fantasies it indulged, every single piece was anchored with a tiny kernel of absolute truth, something said, something seen, something felt; because without that seed of reality in it somewhere, I can't write it so it seems real.

So I conclude from my own body of work that I do indeed "write what I know." I just embroider it a bit.

 

[KeithD]

I try to write to the emotions I have known.

 

[gordo12]

The ‘standard’ advice to writers – particularly inexperienced writers – tends to be: Write what you know. But most writers don’t really know much. And what they do know is often not particularly interesting. Wouldn't it be more useful to encourage people to write what they would like to read?

Just a thought.

LOL, reminded me one of my early stories had a treatise on how to boil water.

(Surprisingly more than one issue)

Beat that for boredom!

 

[Hypoxia]

Beat that for boredom!

I may have belabored the imports of tuning stringed instruments in fourths vs fifths. Other wonky themes keep creeping into my writing. It's my nature. Ask me the time, and I might expound on clock-making, exotic calendars, or relativity.

I've learned to murder some of my darlings. (*) But so many scurry about! At least I keep most quarantined, sitting in discarded chapters.

Emotions I have known? No, I must invent some of those, too.
___

(*) "Murder your darlings" --> edit-out cutely clever constructs.

 

[JanusGoneAwry]

For my part, to write what I know is important because from that I draw confidence and gain credibility and over time as I do research for stories to address the stuff I want to know I gain an increased pallet of props to incorporate into them.

Ultimately for me though, it's about what I can imagine because when I slip on the face of a character, I look through their eyes. It's the ability to become them, or at least get those things that matter to to story from their perspective, down on paper that I find extremely fulfilling. I don't have the expectation of complete unfaltering fidelity of the character but if the reader can believe in them and they move the story forward that's a win for me.

To Sam's OP I think my advice for new writers would essentially be the following quote from a famous educator:

"It's time to take chances. Make mistakes. get messy!"

Ms. Frizzle​

 

[SamScribble]

To Sam's OP I think my advice for new writers would essentially be the following quote from a famous educator:

"It's time to take chances. Make mistakes. get messy!"

Ms. Frizzle​

Good advice!

 

[someoneyouknow]

"Write what you know" is either great advice or terrible advice. It all depends on how you interpret what it means.

I think the right way to look at it is to see it as empowering rather than restricting. It doesn't mean you can't write about a character who's a welder if you know nothing about welding. What it means is that whether you know it or not you have a stock of feelings and wisdom and memories inside you that you can draw upon when writing, and if you DO draw upon them your writing probably will be more authentic and powerful.

That's not to say you shouldn't stretch yourself.

If Tom Clancy had taken this advice seriously in its restrictive sense, he would never have written a thing, because he had no personal experience with the things he wrote about. No horror writer would get started, because nobody "knows" anything about a werewolf. But one's life experience may provide some interesting material for writing about what a werewolf might do.

I'm glad you brought this up (just saw this thread) because as I was reading through the comments I was thinking the same thing.

People like Asimov, Clarke, Gaiman, and Grisham wrote/write about what they know.

But then there's Clancy (as above) and Stephen King. As far as I know, King has no experience with cars coming to life and killing people (though with self-driving cars coming around, that may soon be a reality) or being a woman handcuffed to a bed with a dead body on top of you, or being on a plane which jumps through different dimensions as time fades away.

Sometimes you have to say, "Fuck it. I want to write this."

As an aside, and to get the eyes rolling, Dan Brown has said he researches what he's going to write about for a few years before he writes the book. Just because you don't know about a subject doesn't mean you can't learn about it then write about it.

 

[Grillytilly]

Write what you know can work if you have specialized knowledge or a story already in your head that you want to tell. EX: A nurse starts a health blog with ads to supplement her income or a retiring politician writes his life's story.

Another route is write to fix what's broken. I don't like a thing. I can't stand this thing. It could have been great but they messed it up. OK, fine, then I'll write it the way it's supposed to be.

The next thing I know I'm fully of passion and my fingers are flying across the keyboard.

I didn't like how the episode of Friends that had the sex game ended so I wrote a story and tried to fix it.
I didn't like how Geordi was the best character on TNG but he never got any love so I fixed it.
I didn't like how everything was just way too easy for the main characters in ... You see what I mean.

Another good thing is to figure out how to subvert expectations. In real life people are wrong all the time so let your characters be wrong sometimes. Let things backfire on them. Let there be unintended consequences and misunderstandings and just down right bad luck. Even when the character has good luck make it so that because of that in some other part of their life there is payment for it. Characters have to feel the pain to know they're alive. Then after you've put them through hell, you can finally let them be happy because only then would they have earned it.

 

[FEELINGLUCKYPUNK]

NONE OF THE ABOVE.

Write what matters. Write what readers can decipher.

 

[KeithD]

Speaking of a bad adviser.

 

[Bramblethorn]

I try to write to the emotions I have known.

I like this way of putting it.

Outside the emotional side, perhaps it's more helpful to think in terms of "get to know what you're going to write about".

If Tom Clancy had taken this advice seriously in its restrictive sense, he would never have written a thing, because he had no personal experience with the things he wrote about. No horror writer would get started, because nobody "knows" anything about a werewolf. But one's life experience may provide some interesting material for writing about what a werewolf might do.

Obviously there's nothing to know about real-life werewolves, but there's a lot to know about the genre. If your werewolves are repelled by crosses and garlic, but don't care about silver or the moon, you're likely to have a lot of cranky readers telling you "that's not how it works!"

I may have belabored the imports of tuning stringed instruments in fourths vs fifths. Other wonky themes keep creeping into my writing. It's my nature. Ask me the time, and I might expound on clock-making, exotic calendars, or relativity.

Graph theory, microbiology, herpetology, a few more I've forgotten...

 

[oggbashan]

...


Obviously there's nothing to know about real-life werewolves, but there's a lot to know about the genre. If your werewolves are repelled by crosses and garlic, but don't care about silver or the moon, you're likely to have a lot of cranky readers telling you "that's not how it works!"

...

I get that response because my ghosts can seem solid, and my genies are not slavish sex-toys.

 

[Jada59]

I do write what I know but also what I like to read. Sometimes things come up that I don't know for sure so I do research. I hate reading something then finding out that the author had no clue what they were talking about.

 

[Bramblethorn]

People like Asimov, Clarke, Gaiman, and Grisham wrote/write about what they know.

But then there's Clancy (as above) and Stephen King. As far as I know, King has no experience with cars coming to life and killing people (though with self-driving cars coming around, that may soon be a reality) or being a woman handcuffed to a bed with a dead body on top of you, or being on a plane which jumps through different dimensions as time fades away.

I'm curious about how you're drawing that line such that Gaiman falls on the "write what you know" side and King doesn't.

Gaiman's output is almost 100% magical/fantasy settings. He's written a few "realistic" stories here and there, but all his best-known works are about myths and magic.

By comparison - King's work is mostly supernatural horror, but he also has a significant amount of non-supernatural fiction including some of his best-known works e.g. Misery, most of Cujo, Shawshank, Stand By Me.

Also, quite a few of his stories have writers as protagonists - off the top of my head Misery, The Shining, The Dark Half, Bag of Bones, and I think there are a couple of others that I can't recall just now. Misery in particular is heavily coloured by his own experiences as a writer.

 

[SimonDoom]

I don't know if the "write what you know" adage is even applicable to fantasy, or perhaps even supernatural horror, because the subject matter isn't real, and a there's no standard against which to criticize the author's knowledge or lack of it.

Stephen King is an example of an author who in a sense writes what he knows, because his stories have fantastic premises but tend to have to have many features that are familiar to him: Maine, for one. Writers as protagonists. King grew up in modest financial circumstances, and his character affinities are very obvious. He likes blue collar people and creative people. His heroes are rarely rich business or professional types; they tend to be villains. So he writes what he knows in the sense of projecting what is familiar to him into fantastic settings and story arcs.

 

[Etaski]

I'm curious about how you're drawing that line such that Gaiman falls on the "write what you know" side and King doesn't.

Gaiman's output is almost 100% magical/fantasy settings. He's written a few "realistic" stories here and there, but all his best-known works are about myths and magic.

Both Gaiman and King write what they know. Them being fantastical/horror stories has nothing to do with "What you know."

I see little point with describing "what you know" as somehow not applying to anything "not real/fantastical/magical." Our stories and our myths are real, because we imagine them to be. "I think, therefore I am," if you will.

Gaiman's oeuvre is World Mythology, drawing on our collective folk tales, traditions, and mythologies of the past and pulling them forward into the present day to see where they are still applicable, or exploring how the perception of it might change.

He's a scholar of old stories, not unlike Tolkien but from a different and much broader vantage point. That's what he knows, the guy has long studied it, and that is how he writes what he knows. He reinterprets and retells the old stories in his own way.

King has said he was one of the first generation who grew up with television, and therefore began writing his stories in a sense of describing the actions visually and conveying the atmosphere in a way that builds a visual world around you. Once upon a time, this was a newer, sharper experience (today, it's expected). If you look at many novels prior to King's generation, they aren't nearly as visual the way a TV script might be.

That's what he knows. Write a visual performance as a novel and make the reader feel it like they would on TV/in a movie theater. The subject of the story doesn't matter.

Ergo, if what you know is your own self-reflection of your response to entertainment and performances in any format you prefer, and studying the responses of others since the dawn of mankind as a species of storytellers, then that is how you get to be a storyteller in your own right.

 

[JamesMiehoff]

Best advise I have ever gotten was from my boss at a summer job while I struggled my way through college:

"What did you do wrong today?"

If you said "Nothing", he would yell at you that you didn't do anything that day, because nobody doesn't make mistakes.

If you were honest and told him, he would ask quietly, "And what did you learn from that?"

I approach my writing the same way. There are always going to be mistakes. How much did you learn from them today?

James

 

[Hypoxia]

something to keep in mind

Mainstream author Elizabeth McCracken interview.

The Guardian: You write novels and short stories – what are the virtues of each form?

McCracken: The thing that I like about novels is that they are a more forgiving form. You can make missteps. It’s harder to write a really good short story – I’m more aware of the flaws in my short stories. There’s pleasure in being able to spend that much time with people and ideas in novels, but if you write a short story, the magical period of an idea to the excitement of composition and the first draft is short, but deeply pleasurable in a way novels are not.​

My takeaway: Write what you like. Ps: A little more.

The Guardian: Do you feel that creative writing can be taught?

McCracken: I teach creative writing and I think it’s not like making a souffle; you can’t give anyone the steps to follow. It can’t be taught in the way life drawing can. But you can teach people how to notice what the work they admire is doing, and to sit around a table and look at their writing and how to make it achieve what it wants to achieve.​

Do you know what you want your writing to achieve? What do you want to say when you start any story?