Exploring Writing Advice: Write what you Know
How I learned to apply advice that never seemed to fit.
I never understood this bit of writing advice. I thrive in fantastical worlds, in an imaginary deep past or the far distant future. I always escape to anywhere that isn’t right here and right now. So “write what you know” as writing advice never struck a chord with me.
Until it did.
And, as seems to be my way, it didn’t strike a chord the way you might expect.
To me, “write what you know” didn’t mean writing a memoir of my experiences (I could probably make a good memoir or two, I’ve got some good material.) Nor was it writing a character that was essentially me going through a specific event.
Nope. We’ll take it to the third level of abstraction.
I infused an idea of a challenge I faced into the growth arc of a character. So, not autobiographical, or memoir, not plot, but internal growth arc.
I was growing and changing, and I had my character grow and change, too.
Of course, my growth arc wasn’t nearly as life-changing as my character’s. But there was a solidification of what I was learning about myself and to an extent, a deepening of what I was learning about myself as I wrote my characters’ struggles.
In essence, a bit of self-discovery and a dose of catharsis.
What it allowed me to do for my writing was take a step into my body and put the physical sensations of what I was going through on the page. And to take a step into my mind and draw out the stages of thought and how I felt.
What it allowed me to do for myself was to feel the realization with the character as they figured out how to grow. In Story Genius, Lisa Cron spends a whole chapter describing why our brains need story, that it’s a matter of survival. That what we learn as we follow a character’s internal journey helps us navigate the world around us.
In this case, I wasn’t reading it, I was writing it, and the beauty was that I got to see how diving deeper into my character learning to use her voice was giving me more confidence and strength to do so in my own life.
Because I’ll be real with you. I love the written word. And I love it because I have time to process it. I can re-read writing and I can edit writing. I don’t have just one instant to say the right thing that needs to be said or to make a good impression or to ask a vital question. In conversation, I’m focused on understanding the perspective of the person I’m talking to. I struggle in the moment to weigh what is being said with my own values, feelings, and needs. And if conversation does clash against a hard line (of which there are likely fewer for me than there are for others) I sometimes won’t realize it until the conversation is well over.
And there was one time a hard line was hit and I acted on it and I had a whole nervous system reaction. I was in an IEP meeting for my son, who has physical therapy, occupational therapy, and speech therapy and he’s going to have these needs for the rest of his life. The occupational therapist was new and was feeling the constraints of her position and struggled to think (well, within the box, I guess), about what goals my son would have for another year. She wanted to move his status from actively receiving therapy to consultation. As a teacher and a parent, I knew what this meant and I knew it was a hard no for me and I knew I couldn’t sit there and say nothing.
When I spoke up, my vision darkened, my heart pounded in my chest, my hands gripped the arm of the chair. Action was needed at that very moment and the adrenaline spike threatened to take me out.
But I persevered, and we did not move my son to consult status and me coming up with a goal for him on the spur of the moment was not perfect, but it accomplished the task.
And it was that experience, that knowledge that I infused into my writing. I had that moment to draw from. That experience to deepen how I described what my character was going through on the page as she learned to use her voice.
So “write what you know” doesn’t have to be writing about your whole life. It doesn’t have to be writing about one specific event. It can be about a difficult experience and how you pushed through it and what you learned along the way.
And that’s one way you can apply “write what you know.”