Write what you know - Or not?

Unsplash user Aaron Burden

My favorite stories to read are the ones I wrote myself. I’m not bragging, or being narcissistic (okay, maybe a little), but just being honest. I like the books that I write because they are exactly what I want. They contain all the elements of what I feel makes a good novel. However, there is a small bit of ‘advice’ that has been told to me many times, and actually threatened to derail my writing.

I don’t know who first came up with this advice, but taken at face value, like I took it, it can destroy a young author. You may have heard it, or at least seen it. It’s a relatively small tidbit of creative poison. Write what you know.

This is good advice too, if you add meaning to it. Researching things that you haven’t done before (and might not ever do) is a good way to gain knowledge of whatever-it-is, knowledge that will give your writing credibility. You can’t describe a car if you don’t have some idea of what it should look like.

Despite this, I really don’t think that this can be considered advice. I write in the future (I’ll be posting a sneak peek at Unidentified next week) and in a fantasy world that I created. There is no way I can do real, hard-core research on either of those topic, other than looking into the conventions of the genre I am writing in. That writing is me creating things as I go along, without really thinking too hard about whether or not I actually know what this aspect of this thing looks like.

It is important to have a solid background for your tales. Without at least an idea of where it takes place, you won’t be able to effectively describe setting, or time period. Your story could start to feel like it’s characters living in a featureless box.

But you don’t have to travel to England to get a feel for a castle to put in your fantasy story. You can, and I definitely intend to do that one day, but it isn’t a necessity. Make your castles what you want, however impossible that is.

Writers are creators, and shouldn’t be bound by the limits of what they themselves know. I’ve never been in a stable, or even seen one, but I don’t really need to. I can imagine that it would smell of horses, hay and possibly leather. That’s what I assume, but I don’t know. If anyone’s ever been in a medieval stable, they could probably spot me, but most people haven’t.

That’s my point. Most people won’t know anything about some obscure detail, or even a more significant one. This little fact gives you license to use your imagination! If you don’t know what the inside of a medieval house should look like, it isn’t likely that your readers will either. Just make it up! There is something marvelous called creative license that will explain it away.

As a final note, this isn’t really viable for a fiction story that is set in the present. When describing a culture that actually exists, do proper research. If your character is a mechanic, look into how a car engine works. You just don’t need to have a PhD on the subject. The main focus of this post is fantasy, sci-fi, steampunk, dystopian and other examples of genres that take us away from the present.