Write what you know? No.

(Crossposted from tumblr)


I don’t like the phrase “write what you know”. When people have said it to me, mostly in real life, it was clear that they thought my projects were beyond my ability.

"You don’t know anything about 17th-century naval warfare. Why would you write about that? Write what you know instead."

In other words, if it’s difficult, then you shouldn’t bother trying.

But the world would be a really boring place if people only wrote things based on their own experiences and pre-readied knowledge. Just because someone doesn’t know a lot about the subject doesn’t mean that they aren’t capable of searching and looking and finding out about it.

With books and the internet, you can find out about almost anything, from how to fight with a medieval mace, to how the Battle of the Sound happened, to how the early 20th-century Bubonic Plague outbreak in the United States was dealt with, to how to launch rockets and diffuse land mines.

If you don’t know anything about something that you want to write about, that’s fine. Nobody knows absolutely everything. You have the ability to learn about it, and then write about it. “Write what you know” doesn’t come into it; it’s knowing what you write that is important.