The Worst Writing Advice Ever Given

Allow me to rant.

I'd like to think myself above such tawdry things as screaming into the void on topics of little interest, but no man truly knows the measure of his soul until he is put against the wall.

I have reached my wall.

There is a piece of writing advice out there in the world that I can virtually guarantee you've heard. On the surface it seems a goodly, solid piece of advice. It seems an innocuous, even obvious little chestnut meant to help writers along.

It is not.

It is a cancer. A pestilence. Four simple words, each of them a horseman, bringing with them tedium, frustration, boredom and the death of an artist's creativity.

Do you know them? Have you heard these four catastrophic words?

Write what you know.

Blasphemy, you say! What kind of heretic am I to rail against good writing's central tenet? Let me assure you, oh chorus of the faithful, that I understand the intent behind these words. Trying to write something you know nothing about is just sad fumbling. The emperor will still have no clothes, no matter how much beautiful prose one attempts to wrap him in. But there are limits to the use of this advice, especially in fiction.

Too often, 'writing what you know' is a seductive and insidious primrose path. Because the implication here is that writing what you know automatically results in good material, and therefore requires little more effort than actually putting words to paper. After all, if the key to quality is just to write what you know, then the process is simple, right? Just transcribe your day-to-day onto a page, slap a thin sheen of fiction over it, and bam! You're Earnest goddamn Hemingway!

In fact, this fevered thinking inevitably goes, why stop there? Who do you know better than yourself? Everyone is the hero of their own story, so why not put yourself into the story? The ultimate act of writing what you know short of penning your memoirs. Of course, you'll have to change the name, maybe add some endearing foibles and a limp or something, but your readers will never know. But why not go deeper?! Every story needs its supporting characters, so why not pull all the people in your life into this grand adventure? Work your literary magic, and you can finally ask that pretty barista out, or get your revenge on that asshole from accounting who keeps sending you snarky emails in a world of your own creation!

And down the spiral we go. As a wizened old sage once said: Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny. What began as the noble impulse to write becomes twisted into just one more of the endless self-insert power fantasies, in which our protagonist becomes nothing more than a vessel for the wish fulfillment of the author. Doubtless you've run into this flavor of fiction written by a victim of these four damnable words. And they are victims, make no mistake. They are as lost children, tempted from the village by the pied piper's song of an easy way out. Because as simple as it would be to brush all of these off as 'just bad writing', the root of the problem lies in the advice that shaped them.

These are the loudest, most obvious casualties of the fatal misinterpretation of 'write what you know'. But there are others; well-meaning but ultimately misguided attempts to follow this catechism that are all the more tragic for the subtlety of their disaster. These are the enthusiasts, who want to share their love of whatever captures their imagination with their readers.

For instance, say you're a data scientist with a soft spot for French poetry. What harm could it do for your protagonist to be, say, a janitor with a soft spot for French poetry? You've skillfully avoided the trap of self-insertion, and now you're free to wax rhapsodic about Hugo and Verlaine to your heart's content. But this love can spread like a virus, infecting paragraph after paragraph with your own interest until your story is one part plot to ten parts Baudelaire. And the poor readers who just wanted to find out if that janitor finds the Mop of Destiny are swallowed by page after page of unrelated rambling on the virtues of the Symbolists. Thus are otherwise good writers tempted tempted to the ultimate sin: Boring their readers. Left unchecked, writing what you know turns what could have been an interesting story into an Ouroboros of self-reference. A circle-jerk of one.

What, then is to be done?

The Amendment

The problem here is one of wording. "Write what you know" is vague. It could mean anything from "Include something you know as a fun factoid" to "Literally just publish your diary". The ambiguity is like a serpent in the garden of your mind, hissing bad ideas into your ears. So let me offer this, an amendment to those four calamitous words:

Adapt what you know.

Put another way, translate your knowledge and experiences for your reader. It's harder than it sounds. It takes a leap of faith to take a step away from yourself, especially when you're doing something as personal as writing.

To do so, we must first come to terms with an uncomfortable fact: what you "know" is more than likely boring. Unless you're an astronaut or a hitman or a world leader, chances are your daily life is a snooze in the grand scheme of things. (That goes triple for writers. Writing is intrinsically boring to watch. Let me not mince words, for any of you thinking about writing a story about your experiences as a writer: It's likely going to be soul-crushingly tedious, and waste of your and everyone else's time.) But what you can imagine is incredible. Your mind is a wellspring of untold wonders. Infinite possibilities are rolling around in your head, each one of them a key to enriching and emboldening someone's dull, monotonous routine. The challenge is giving those imagined possibilities tangible details for your readers to latch onto, which is where what you know comes into play. Without the unique meaning you bring from your own experience, nothing you write can ever be real for your writers. But it takes effort to turn something meaningful to you into something that a reader will find meaningful.

Every writer is a tiny god, tending worlds of their own making. They can be vast, sweeping expanses or the size of someone's inner thoughts, but one rule remains true no matter the world: gods should work in mysterious ways. Writers should not think themselves more interesting than their creations, for that way lies boredom and disdain. The instant a reader finds an author lurking in their pages, all tension is sucked from the story. After all, how can I worry about what's going to happen to a character when I know their real-life counterpart is sitting comfortably at home, spinning their next semi-autobiographical yarn? As soon as I start the first page of a story, I know that I'm getting to look around inside a writer's mind. The trick is to make me forget it.

So, before you start trawling through your journal for your next big plot point, consult the helpful checklist below. If you find yourself answering "yes" to most or all of these questions, have no fear. It just means that it's time to stop transcribing, and start adapting.

The Write What You Know Addicts Anonymous (WWYKAA) Checklist:

Character

1. Does this character share my profession?
2. Does this character share my interests and hobbies?
3. Do I find myself agreeing with and cheerleading this character as I write them?
4. Do this character's views on a particular timely topic align exactly with my own?
5. Does this character share my mannerisms, communication style, and say all the things I want to but never could??
6. Does this character exhibit flaws of character such as excessive modesty, unrestrained generosity, immoderate forgiveness, or being too quick to make friends?
7. (See numbers 1-6) Is this character the protagonist of the story?

Style

1. Is this story lifted directly from something that happened in my own life?
2. Does this story include long, detailed discourses on an activity or field of study with which I am intimately familiar?
3. If I gave this same discourse in person at a party, would my audience swiftly find themselves wishing for the sweet release of death?
4. Does the arc of this narrative fulfill an unresolved tension deep within my soul unrelated to the needs and wants of my characters?
5. Does this story include frequent references to the literature/film/art I consider my inspiration, and does my reader need to read/watch/look at the above to really "get" my story?

Setting

1. Does my story take place within five miles of my childhood home/current place of residence?
2. Does this story include frequent references to specific places with which I have particularly strong associations and memories?
3. Does this story take place during a time which I found personally transformative?
4. Would the quality of this story suffer if I moved it from its exact time and place?
5. Does this story include lengthy passages drawn from my early childhood memory, repurposed as exposition?