The "Write What You Know" Trap

Write What You Know

It's not that it's bad advice, but it also just isn't advice at all. First of all, let's be clear about one thing: "Write what you know" is not actually a piece of advice. It's not something that can help you, or even guide you in any way. Instead, "write what you know" is a trap. It's something to avoid. Sure, it's a good way to get started. But it's easy to fall into a trap of writing what you think will be easy and familiar… and then getting stuck there.

This phrase isn't all it's cracked up to be. In fact, if we were to actually follow it, we would literally never write anything at all. Why? Because the truth is that you know very little. You don't really know what it's like to be someone else, or how they think or experience the world. You can imagine and empathize, but you cannot truly know.

You see, "write what you know" means something different depending on who hears it. A woman thinks, "I'm a woman, I can only write stories about women." A man thinks, "I'm a man, I can only write stories about men." Someone who has lost a loved one thinks, "I've lost someone close to me; therefore I can only write about personal loss."

What happens here is that we focus on our own personal experiences and let them define us; we stop ourselves from writing about other things because those things are outside our scope of knowledge—because they didn't happen to us personally. This is extremely limiting! It's like saying you can't write a story about aliens because you're not an alien yourself. Or that you can't write about being an astronaut because you've never been to space.

The problem is that when we hear "Write what you know," we tend to interpret it as "Only write what you know." This can lead us to have a very limited scope of what we write about, and even more importantly, it can prevent us from taking risks—in our lives and in our writing.

When we start out as writers, we only have a limited amount of experience to draw on. And this makes sense! Our lives are short and full of things that need doing. We can't possibly live all the experiences and learn all the lessons of every single person we meet. So we shouldn't feel bad about the fact that most of us don't have much to say at first. We should just be aware of this lack, and recognize that it doesn't mean we can't be writers.

Writing what you DON’T know is ok because it is a big part of being a writer—that's where your curiosity will take you, and where you'll get to do some of your most creative work.

In Conclusion

Writing is about creating things that are new, that have never existed before. Sure, maybe they're based on things from real life—but it's the way those ideas and experiences connect and grow into something completely different that makes them meaningful. It's about opening up a conversation between you and the reader, where both of you are learning something together.

You don't have to write about science fiction or high fantasy if that's not what you're comfortable with—but try challenging yourself by exploring something that isn't completely familiar. What if you wrote about something that isn't your life, but could still be relatable for your audience? What if you wrote about a character who is unlike anyone in real life, but still has human characteristics? Or how about writing from the perspective of someone who has an opinion different from your own?

The key here is GROWTH—you can't grow as a writer if you never push yourself outside of your comfort zone and try something new!

So if I had to give advice to my fellow aspiring writers, I'd say this:

Write what interests you, intrigues you and excites you—because those are the things that will also interest, intrigue and excite your readers.

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