Transcript:

With so much writing advice online, my job as a teacher and writing coach often involves debunking or clarifying popular tips that confuse writers. They just keep showing up again and again with very little context for my writers, which leads them to taking these things as hard and fast rules or getting mixed up in what they are actually saying.

For our first video in the series called “Unpacking Common Writing Advice”, I will be breaking down the one I hear most often and see the most confusion with: “Write What You Know.” This is one many writing teachers seem to think is obvious, but they don’t understand that many take this phrase literally. If that were the case, speculative fictions writers like myself would cease to exist… a terrifying thought.

Hi, I’m C. Sloan Lewis and Welcome to my channel.

One key thing to understand when breaking down the tip “Write What You Know” is that fiction mirrors reality. It isn’t about limiting yourself to your literal life—it’s about drawing on emotional truths to create authentic characters and stories.

My characters typically exist in worlds and situations far different from our own, but they go through the exact same things internally. They grapple with and overcome things like imposter syndrome, guilt, grief, longing, and love just to name a few. Sure, they might be trying to become a queen or great wizard, but it’s not all that different from someone working to run their own business or get a promotion.

Here’s the thing: You can write about fire breathing dragons and never before seen magic systems without ever having experienced them, but you can’t really write about grief if you’ve never experienced it. I learned this lesson firsthand. One of my stories felt flat until I became a mother. Suddenly, I understood the emotions of my character—a parent struggling with being separated from her child—on a much deeper level. When I first started the story, I had no idea what it would feel like to have a child and be apart from them, and thanks to the intrusive thoughts of motherhood, even the thought of losing them forever. But now that I know, the story has taken on new life, and even though it is set in a post-apocalypic setting, it feels real.

This isn’t to say you should have a child to make your writing stronger. In fact, don’t do that. But it serves to prove the inner feelings and perspectives we have experienced are at the core of the “write what you know” advice. We have to be able to fully empathize with our characters to make their experiences real to the reader.

If you’re unsure how this might apply to your own writing, I would sit down and make a list of the different areas of life’s ups and downs that you’ve experienced. For me, some of my experiences would be childbirth (but with an epidural), being a mother, getting married, losing a mentor to suicide, dealing with imposter syndrome, and struggling with early adulthood. All of these things have come up, one way or another, in the stories I write. And honestly, it doesn’t even have to be as intentional as the advice suggests.

More than anything, it should be advised to NOT write what you don’t know. You haven’t lost a loved one to cancer? Don’t write about it. You haven’t ever experienced depression? Don’t write about it. There are other writers out their who have, so let them do it, and do it accurately. Just because it happened to your favorite character in a TV show doesn’t mean you know anything about what it is actually like. Focus on what you understand.

And that’s not to gatekeep. What I am trying to help you avoid is coming off sounding fake and possibly even insulting to those who have experienced those things. Plus, it’s just harder to write about an experience you haven’t felt because so much of creative writing relies on analogies and other figurative language to show an experience. This can often lead to romanticizing situations or mental health disorders and misleading your reader, like using a creative character’s depression as a way to explain why he is such a deep thinker. He’s not dealing with depression, which often makes it feel impossible to do anything, he’s just broody.

As a caveat to all this, you can always research and learn about the experiences and perspectives of others. If you want to write about a character who has depression, you can research the disease and read the writings of other writers who have struggled with it to get a better understanding. I think there are very few experiences at this point that you couldn’t write about with enough study. This is definitely true for secondary or minor characters because you can’t fully understand everyone in every situation, but seek to understand as best you can.

Ultimately, “Write What You Know” isn’t about limiting yourself to your lived experiences—it’s about grounding your stories in the truths you understand. It’s about finding the emotional connections and universal struggles that breathe life into your characters and make your worlds feel real, no matter how fantastical they may be.

The more you embrace what you’ve learned from your own journey, the richer and more authentic your writing will become. And if there’s something you don’t yet know? Dive in. Research. Learn. Empathize. Writing is as much about discovery as it is about creativity.

If you found this video helpful, give it a thumbs up and share your thoughts in the comments—what does “Write What You Know” mean to you? And don’t forget to subscribe for more videos in the “Unpacking Common Writing Advice” series.

You’ve got some writing to do, and I’ll see you next week. Ta-ta!