What To Write About Instead Of What You Know

The first novel I ever wrote was a young adult story about a girl detective who solved mysteries with her brothers and her best friend. No no, I never got it published, but if the premise sounds familiar to you, that’s because I got all my ideas from my favorite childhood series, The Trixie Belden Mysteries (similar to but not as well known as Nancy Drew).

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, right?

Small wonder that no publisher wanted that book. It had been written before! Not word for word of course, but the big picture was hardly original. 

That novel deserved rejection, but I can’t be fully blamed for my old copy-cating ways.  Why? Because I believed that single piece of advice I’d heard all my life, the advice every writer knows:

“Write what you know.”

Ah, the good intentions. It sounds like wise instruction. Don’t know what to write about? Write what you know. Young and inexperienced? No problem, just write what you know. Struggling with writer’s block?  Write what you know.

The idea behind these words is true enough: don’t worry about saying something new and brilliant that no one has ever heard before. Just write from a place of your authentic self because no one can say it like you can say it. I get it.  But what this advice caused me to do in the early years of writing was essentially to mimic.  Parrot.

Steal.

Okay, steal is a strong word and truthfully, mimicry has its place.  All artists should study and, yes, even copy their favorite artist’s works.  We’ve all got to learn somehow.  But eventually we have to set aside the milk and graduate to solid food. 

As Tony Morrison once said, “People say to write about what you know. I’m here to tell you, no one wants to read that, cos you don’t know anything.”

I wish I’d heard those words much sooner in my writing life.

So what are we to do? What’s left to write about?

Simple.

Love.

Write what you love. Write about what excites you, what you can’t stop thinking about, what you don’t know but want answers to.  Write about whatever it is that you can’t not writer about. Yes, girl detective books were what I loved growing up, but what I really loved was the techniques: dynamic characters, twisty plots, face-paced prose. That’s what I should have written about, not entire rip-offs of what had already been done before.

Do you love the Harry Potter books? Great, by all means draw inspiration from those. But don’t ship your male protagonist off to a wizarding school in a magical realm and simply change the names. That’s what you know, and you’re better than that.  What you love is the adventure, the young characters coming of age, and, okay, probably dragons (“It simply isn’t an adventure worth telling if there aren’t any dragons”—J. R.R. Tolkien).

When I stopped cheating off other’s people’s work, it freed me to figure out what I loved and to write about that: adventure, young male leads, brotherhood, magical creatures and lands. My writing is finally my own. So write what you love, and be unapologetic about it.  You can be sure that if you love it, someone else out there will too.