When I first started writing, more than one person gave me that cliched and familiar advice to write what you know

It troubled me. I wanted to write about riding dragons and visiting distant worlds – and I hadn’t experienced any of those things. Regrettably, I have to report, I still haven’t. So how could I be a real author while also creating the speculative and imaginative stories I wanted to write? Did that mean I wasn’t – I couldn’t be – a proper author? Did I have to restrict myself to thrilling tales of visits to the supermarket and sitting at an office desk?

Of course, it did not. I titled this piece Write What You Don’t Know, and I think there’s a lot of value in that notion. Fiction is fiction, not fact. Fiction is a work of imagination. It only works because the writer invents things, describes situations they could not possibly have experienced in the real world. Perhaps only in small ways (for example because they made up a character), and perhaps in huge ways (because, say, they created an entire galactic civilisation). However big the fantasy, the writer creates things they didn’t previously “know”, sets down the words – and the reader then makes those situations feel real in their imaginations. The writer makes stuff up, and then the reader makes stuff up – and everyone is (hopefully) happy with the illusion.

“Stories are a way of reordering the world – or, dammit, of throwing the world away and making a better one in its place.”

Taken literally, write what you know is hideously limiting. It implies boring fiction. It implies limiting yourself – and that’s always to be avoided. Stories are a way of reordering the world – or, dammit, of throwing the world away and making a better one in its place. Or perhaps a worse one, a crueller one. Or a more exciting one.

What I’ve come to understand is that there is more than one way to “know” something. There’s direct experience, but there’s also what your imagination can conjure up. There are the things that you “know” could exist, or at least feel as if they could exist. By a creative effort, you can “know” what it’s like to weave magic or be on a starship under attack or whatever it may be. You can experience it in your brain, so the reader can, too (again – hopefully). That does not make for less worthy storytelling that “realist” writing. In fact, I’d say, quite the opposite is true. The mundane world is precisely that a lot of the time: mundane. Books let us escape that. And creating believable characters and imaginary worlds for them to live in is, arguably, a purer and greater act of creation, precisely because it requires more imagination.

So, I think what I’m saying is that every book is better with dragons or spaceships in it^*.

I do think the old adage is true, though – to a degree. You can and probably should draw on what you know. To date, as mentioned, I still have not ridden a dragon (I’m still hopeful), but I have done things the experience of which I could make use to describe such a thing. I’ve ridden on extreme roller coasters and been in aeroplanes experiencing strong turbulence, and I’ve even jumped out of a couple of aeroplanes (with a parachute). A writer can make use of experiences such as these to make imaginary situations feel real. The rush of air, the weightlessness, the sense of the ground looming nearer – I can pull them in to a piece of fiction and describe what it’s like on the back of a swooping dragon.

“What I’ve come to understand is that there is more than one way to “know” something.”

And, characters. Character lies at the heart of story. How they feel and react to horror or delight or fear or love – these are the essence of any story. And these, of course, are things we all know. The rest is scenery. All fiction is fantasy, and even in the most fantastical of fantasy, writers write what they’ve experienced on some level.

So, write what you know, for sure – but don’t let yourself be restricted by it. And, better still, make use of it and go write what you don’t know – yet.

^* Not really. There are probably one or two books that are fine as they are.

You can find Simon Kewin’s books here: https://simonkewin.co.uk/