When you tell people you are a writer, or that you want to be, you will invariably hear a piece of advice that all non-writers love to share: write what you know.
So, what does that mean and are you doing it?
What Do You Know?
Though this little bit of advice is well-intentioned, hearing that you should write what you know is extremely discouraging.
What if you want to write about a fantasy world that exists far from planet Earth, or dive into a time that is long, long past? What if you have never worn a corset or held a sword or gone into battle behind the yoke of a starship flying across the galaxy? Does every story you write have to be set yesterday in a suburb or a city that millions of people already know? What if your character wants to eat truffles…and you've never tasted one?
Write what you know is a pretty impossible thing, when you really think about it.
But there's good news. This trite and usually unwanted phrase, "write what you know," does not mean what many people think it means.
What Should You Write?
First, don't ever let anyone tell you what to write. While feedback is nice and most people genuinely want to help, ignore them. Every writer has to find their own voice and their own story to write. No one can really help you with that.
Second, you know what it is to be a human. You've had a crush, fallen in love, experienced heartbreak. Even if you've never had a passion-fueled affair or drove to Vegas in a convertible, you've loved TV or movie characters. You've experienced the grief of loss. You did and didn't get your way. Maybe you loved and adored a movie icon. Maybe you cried when a favorite character died.
These feelings are universal to the human experience, whether you're falling in love with someone on a screen from the safety of your couch or you're hurtling across a desert landscape in a Bronze Age chariot.
You still know love. You know grief. You know joy and pain. And for what you don't know, like how fast a chariot can move, there is research. Plenty of people have described the taste of truffles or the heat of a desert sun in painful detail.
The thing that makes stories great is not how many explosions there are, how many fantastical creatures you can shove into it, how often the main character performs a spell. It's in the human experience that the story tells.
And you definitely have experience with being a human. You know what it is to be human. So all you really need to do is write human characters. Wherever they go, whatever they eat, whoever they love, infuse them with what you know about being a human. Give them flaws. Watch them fall down. See how they overcome these struggles, how they find love, how they manage hate. Whether that story takes place in the suburbs or on an alien planet, that is a story people will like reading.
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