If I were to have followed the standard advice of “write what you know” (meaning only write from personal experience), then none of my books would ever have come into being. I would never have written about anything historical (how could I, if I was born in 19-hrmahrm?), or about anything set in Brittany, or certainly I could never ever have written anything to do with dinosaurs (who could?).
The only book I’ve written that had a shred of “what I know”ishness to it is Dreams of the Desert Wind. The setting was a place I lived in for a time (Jerusalem) and I drew on a lot of personal experience for descriptions of the street scenes (like the one mentioned here, with “Samovar Man“).
No, when I started writing, if I’d written only what I knew, then I’d have written a book about working in IT (now there’s a page-turner), or something set in the world of classical music.
From the age of . . . yeesh . . . ten? or so? and all throughout school, music was my world. Starting with violin (always a great thing for a bespectacled young boy in the ’60s to carry to school), and moving on to viola, and thence to bass guitar, miraphone, and bassoon (with a brief side trip to French horn . . . don’t ask), I spent most of my waking hours playing, practicing, and performing music. Eventually , I ended up conducting school, community, and youth orchestras; I even rehearsed and conducted a local production of Gian Carlo Menotti’s “The Medium.”
At university, though, I hit a wall, and my headlong rush toward a hoped-, prayed-, and yearned-for career as a conductor was derailed. I could play many instruments, but not piano (a non-negotiable requirement). The whole two-stave, two-hands-making-different-music thing was just too alien to my obviously single-threaded brain. I continued to play viola, though, for decades. I was principal viola for several regional orchestras, and while my talent never ascended to the “tour the world as a concert soloist” level, I definitely had professional-level ability. But making a living as a symphony violist was difficult in the ’80s and ’90s; you pretty much had to have three jobs and teach private lessons on the side (not much has changed, in some ways, eh?), so when I got a job in IT, I stuck with it, and music was downgraded to an “avocation.”
It was an avocation that I finally put down when I started writing seriously, in the mid-’90s, but never ever did I consider writing a story (much less a novel) about the world of classical music performance. It’s not that a story couldn’t be crafted–there is plenty of drama, with all of the over-sized egos, political machinations, sordid affairs, and interpersonal WTF-ness going on in that world–but it just wasn’t a setting that screams “ripped from the headlines” or “what happens next?”
I did, however, “write what I knew” in that I studied my subjects for months before committing the first word. And I mean months . . . months spent scouring libraries, poring over historical maps, and cajoling subject-matter experts into guiding me along my journey of self-instruction.
And I think I did pretty well.
So, rather than “Write what you know,” I’d say “Know what you write.”
Another thing to know? Know that you’ll definitely get something wrong, regardless of whether you lived it or studied it, and that some little mind will have a absolute gas nit-picking your work, screaming to the world that your book sucks and you’re a buffoon because you mistakenly placed that restaurant on 5th Avenue when everyone knows it’s on 5th Avenue West.
Poltroons.
Onward,
k
Can’t agree with you more, Kurt! If every author was writing what they knew/experienced, I’d be worried about all the authors of crime novels running around… (including myself!). “Know what you write” makes a lot more sense! Thanks for continuing to inspire me!
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Ha! Yeah, there would be a LOT to worry about if we only wrote what we experienced.
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