I began writing years before I ever heard the words write what you know strung together and aimed at writers. I’m awfully glad about that. I’d likely have misunderstood it.
From my very first attempt at writing fiction I immersed myself in a culture and place I’d never experienced in order to bring my characters to life. The challenge of recreating a world I’ve never seen save in photographs, or artifacts, or reenacted history, is still a huge part of what fuels my passion for fiction writing.
I love the learning!
Not only do I write about places I’ve never seen, time periods I never lived in, situations I’ve never experienced, I write about races that I don’t belong to. As far as I know….
After all the generations since the early 1600s when I’m told my ancestor at Jamestown married a Powhatan girl (not Pocahontas), I must have so little Native American blood that it really canโt matter. Yet Iโm fascinated with Native American history and the history of colonial frontier settlement, and how the cultures of red and white clashed and mixed. Especially intriguing to me are those men and women, European, native, and mixed, who lived in the shifting place between their two cultures.
Slavery, and what it did to those enslaved and those doing the enslaving, is another big draw for me. I’ve never owned a slave, or been a slave. I have no direct experience.
Nor have I been a father, or a son. I’ve never even been a parent. Yet Iโm drawn to deep and troubled father/son themes in the stories I write, from the first novel twenty years ago to my current work in progress. Where does that interest come from? It’s simply there, woven into the weft of me.
So Iโve become a perpetual student of the things I donโt inherently know, but canโt seem to stop writing about.
Know what you write, whatever that is. Find every means you can to immerse yourself in the subject, whether that’s a person, setting, or situation, then let your characters live those themes and conflicts that just won’t let you go. Which brings me to this:
If by write what you know we’re talking about emotions… then yes. We all know those. Love, jealousy, resentment, grief, elation, passion. I may not have lived on the frontier, or had to shoot my own supper, and skin and butcher it too, but I’ve been worried, afraid, determined, proud of an accomplishment, dashed by disappointment and failure. I’ve been in love. I’ve had my heart broken. I’ve faced death, just not by bear or panther or musket ball. Or a cruel overseer.
I can learn what I need to know to write the situations I’ve never experienced, then take what I do know–emotion–and breathe life into the characters who do what I’ve never done, see what I’ve never seen.
I wrote about this a little bit today, but with a different slant. I need to write in the genre that I know and am familiar with. As a beginning it is silly for me to try and write in YA contemporary, when I love to read historical romance.
I totally love the slant you put on it, because you are right in that we have to experience the emotions in order to know how to portray them vividly.
Great post.
I discovered that too, Sherrinda, when I tried to write a contemporary set novel. When I made the hero a historical writer, and started writing and including excerpts of the story HE was working on, and finding that story more interesting than the contemp story I was trying to tell… I realized it was historicals I should be writing. That's what I liked to read, after all. Doesn't hurt to try something new, but not every genre is for every writer.
Thanks for the comment!