Writing What You Know: Start There

Yeah, yeah: It’s write what you know time again. If you’re a writer who likes to talk shop, you can’t escape it — most of us probably startle out of bed at night screaming WRITE WHAT YOU KNOWWWWWWWWW at least five times a week. And the only thing more numerous than conversations about WWYK are opinions about WWYK. Which means that I, as a self-respecting literary superstar, have to generate new opinions about it on a regular basis or risk fading into obscurity.

My basic take on WWYK has always been that it’s a good guideline to remind yourself not to rely on bullshit, but it shouldn’t be taken too literally, or your work devolves into memoir. But recently I’ve been thinking about another way of looking at WWYK: Using what you know as a starting point.

Start Here

Worrying over writing what you know assumes that you’re supposed to be some sort of expert in everything you put into your story, which simply isn’t — or doesn’t have to be — true. But you do need some level of verisimilitude, of course. Write What You Know doesn’t mean you have to be an expert in what you’re writing, it means you should draw on something you are an expert in.

So, for example, let’s say you’re writing a story about a contract killer. You are not yourself a contract killer, nor have you ever been (I assume). So how can you write what you know? Well, you’ve had a job. You know what it’s like to work for someone else, doing something you’re variably good at. Start there.

Or maybe you’re writing a story about a couple getting a divorce, but you’ve never been married, or even had a bad breakup. You’ve probably had some sort of painful experience involving someone else, an argument, a fight, a decades-long prank war involving increasingly cruel and elaborate pranks that shatter lives and destabilize civilization, something. Start there.

These things don’t have to map 1:1 to the details of your fiction. You’re just looking for a starting point, a way to take your lived-in experience and extrapolate it into something you’ve never lived. That’s how you use WWYK — you take what you know and write it into your story. It’s a starting point.

So am I sitting here wondering how I can map a lifestyle that is 75% sitting in a comfortable chair and 25% drinking pleasant adult beverages and 19% Internet rabbit holes onto cyberpunk sci-fi stories about murderous cyborgs and the desperate professional killers that fight them? You know I am, hun.