If You Give a Girl a Pen… » Blog Archive

July 2, 2009 | Filed in: Guest Bloggers,Writing Skills

I used to hate that expression. Write what you know. Because what did I know, really? I know how to iron clothes and cook spaghetti. I know how to play the violin and jump rope, among other things. But writing a full-length novel about a woman who cooks spaghetti in her spare time and applies other mundane tasks, such as ironing, to her busy life as a jump-roping violinist didn’t sound all that appealing.

Surely when Rowling wrote of the magical world of Hogwarts and witches and wizards she’d never actually experienced such fantasy. And when Tolkien brought us to a land of hobbits and sharp-toothed Orcs killing to help the evil wizard acquire a magical ring, he wasn’t writing from his past adventures.

So how do we write what we know? How do authors pull readers into an intriguing world of fiction if they’re not experts on the topic they write about? Is it simply a grand amount of research or is there some other secret we’re not privy to?

I wrote this book in which the main characters spent a lot of time on horses, trotting along the beach and enjoying nature. I know nothing about horses and have only ridden a few in my lifetime. But this mattered little to me because I knew this book had to have horses in it. It was like a movie reel playing over and over in my mind, conversations between the characters on the horses. A budding romance out on the beach after a ride on a beautiful brown mare (of course I think I called most of the horses stallions at this point because, like I said, I knew nothing about horses). My point is, I had a vision for the book. That’s all I had. I didn’t know much about horses, I didn’t know how in the world a saddle was attached or even if I wanted to, but I knew without a doubt what I wanted in my story. And so, though I had to do research on horses and get advice, I still wrote what I knew in a sense. I focused on the character’s passion for these animals, the way the characters bonded over their mutual love of horses. I knew how to write this much and more.

When someone tells you to write what you know, it’s amazing how many tools you have at your disposal. You know about love and loss, you know about dreams, you know about passion for writing or whatever else you enjoy doing. These emotions are a wonderful beginning to building a character around a world that can seem as tangible as reality, even if you have to do some research.

So what kind of scenarios do you view in your imagination? What do your characters long for, dream about? What are they challenged with? If you can create all these things and feel them, experience them, love them as you follow that mental journey, then you can write them. Acquiring information about a character’s profession or facts about the city of your setting will take work but it is definitely doable. But the rest of the story, how real you make it, is the foundation of it all.

Write what you know and we’ll see insight into imaginative minds that process emotions and experiences in unique ways. We’ll see individuality in writing, and a perspective we may never have thought of. Dare to draw from your own experiences and then paint them in a new way, writing what you know that others may not.

Cindy Wilson

Cindy enjoys reading and writing inspirational fiction. Her first novel, Through It All, will be released in 2009. She is married, with two beautiful daughters, and spends most of her time at home with them and her wonderful husband.

Bookmark This

17 Comments so far
Leave a comment

Great post. I always used to laugh at the phrase “Write what you know.” I too felt I knew nothing. It’s amazing that once you start writing, “what you know” is exactly what starts appearing on your pages even if it’s in the form of a hobit making spagetti while jump roping. You always take some of yourself into what you write.

Cindy Wilson

Recent Posts

Recent Comments

Categories

Archives

Sarah's Tweet

Jamie's Tweet

Eden's Tweet

Marybeth's Tweet

Subscribe to our Posts Via Email

Authors

Blogs We Love

Meta