Feeding The Muse

Writing What You Know

I see this all the time. "Write What You Know." As if somehow only your life experience is the thing you should be writing about or you won't be taken seriously as a writer.

This is fine for some people if that's what they want but why should it be the only option?

My imagination is filled with different characters and plots. People I don't know, lives I've never lived but the adventures in my head come pouring out on paper or on the screen and I become so eager to get them down. This doesn't happen when I contemplate taking stories simply from my own life. Maybe someday I'll write my autobiography but to me it would be only marginally as interesting as the stories I imagine.

Writing about my life in my city, on my street. Or writing about thrilling plots and fascinating people. For me, there's no contest.

Now, mind you sometimes I do throw in little tidbits of myself and my personal knowledge here and there but if I only wrote about my own life, well, I'm 29. It'd be a rather short book.

Also, isn't doing research and incorporating it into your fiction, 'writing what you know'? If I want to set my novel in Paris but I've never been to Paris (I am a writer after all)(laughs) and I look up details about Paris to make the city come alive, don't I now know it? Aren't I writing about what I know if I've learned about it?

Something to think about for those people who look down on those who like to branch out of their hometown and reside in the land of make-believe.