Greetings, Writers! Our fearless leader, the inestimable Sensible Shoes, is off this week so you’re stuck with me.
Last week the topic was bad writing advice, and one common piece of writing advice is to “Write what you know.” But if we all limited ourselves to what we know, would there ever be stories with dragons? Starships? Elf lords? Light sabers? Magic spells? Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion? C-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate?
These are thoughts I’ve had many times over the years, and at some point I began to wonder if this advice was really meant to be so limiting. Did the person who first came up with it really envision salesmen writing stories about salesmen, and bankers writing stories about banks? Did they intend such a pedestrian landscape of fiction as that advice might produce? True, there could still be stories about sea captains, but only if sea captains wrote them.
On the one hand, if you’re going to write a story of high seas adventure, you’d better either know it through and through, serve two years before the mast to learn it, do a metric ton of research on it, or pray to whatever gods may be that your readers are as much in the dark about it as you are. Because if you get something wrong, and your readers are experts, they’re going to throw your book away with great force.
Well, then, one answer is that it’s okay to write stories of Elf Lords armed with light sabers riding unicorns into battle, because no reader is an expert on that, so you have a free hand to create as you please and no one may say you nay. What are they going to do, object that your elves aren’t like the ones they’ve met?
And, certainly, writing from your own experiences can be good advice. If you were right in the thick of the last financial meltdown, or the height of the AIDS crisis, or the Second Battle of Fallujah, you have life experience that we would all benefit from hearing about.
But on the other hand, I’ve been suspecting for some time now that “write what you know” has another meaning. One less about plot and setting and more about character. You may be writing a story about two brothers who open a shuttle repair shop on a distant planet, but are you an only child? Forget about the planet. Can you write the relationship between the brothers believably? Or maybe you’re writing the story of a husband and wife in a war-torn kingdom who give shelter to the king’s grand vizier, on the run since he betrayed his lord. But have you ever been married? Can you make the main characters’ relationship realistic, or will they come across as mere stock characters, married in name only?
Last week, bonetti gave an example of someone who had grown up in Wyoming and had first-hand experience of isolation, which could easily translate to a character who is isolated on an abandoned space station or a desert island. You can take elements from your own life, and apply them to your characters.
I think “write what you know” has less to do with the setting of your story and more to do with the people who inhabit it. If you’re writing about a person with a typical modern life, like your own, but their reactions and emotions are artificial and unreal, you’re not writing what you know. If you’re writing about a griffon wrangler on the fifth planet in the Epsilon Eridani system facing a horde of zombies, but you’ve reached down deep inside and all of their fear of the unknown, their love of their friends, and their desperation to survive is as real as if you were facing the zombies yourself, then you are writing what you know.
Tonight’s challenge:
Write a scene where the characters are facing challenges or dealing with things that don’t exist in our world, but show how their reactions are grounded in the things we all have in common.
Use characters from your own work-in-progress or some of our usual stock characters and situations.
Try to limit yourself to 150 words, and see if you can engage at least 3 senses.
Remember, even if our world doesn’t have dragons in it, and you stick to writing “what you know,” you can still write a story with dragons in it. I, unfortunately, cannot; I’ve given up dragons for Lent.
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