Write What You Know: Why It Helps and Where It Hurts
I’m a full-time physics teacher, in between my fantasy writing escapades, and one of the most solid pedagogical enhancements to your teaching is to know your students. If you know them you can relate to them or find ways to help that relationship in the classroom. You can even tailor certain lessons to suit particular students. Furthermore, you know when they are doing well or when they are having a hard time. In physics, the latter is not rare. Yet students remain calmer if they see you know them and can empathize, helping them over the hurdles that they invariably clear themselves.
As much as I love teaching, “know your students” is not much different to “know your customer.” It is a commonly employed sales tactic to get the customer to purchase more. When you put it like that, I am just a glorified physics sales agent trying to get some young clientele onboard.
When it comes to writing, strangely, it is almost the same. Write what you know. At least, that is what Mark Twain may have said. In this case, again, you have come to the right place. I am the world’s foremost expert on Teloshka and the history of Teloshka. I can tell you everything about the place, including the distance the planet sits from its orange dwarf star, the reason weather phenomena are both predictable and intense, and even how long a season lasts. I have tried to leave no stone unturned.
Then there are the characters. I know a lot about them too. I know parts of their genealogy, their backgrounds, and the political era they inhabit. I know it all. I literally wrote the book about the history of Teloshka (yes, literally, though it is not for sale yet).
When Twain said “Write what you know,” I did. Except I made it up. I made it up within the realms of physical potential. I did not create a fantasy world that could never exist. Many writers do, of course, and does that make them wrong? Not at all. That is the beauty of fantasy. In my world, everything that happens could be plausible. There are some stretches of biological possibility, but not to the point of complete nonsense.
Knowing Teloshka and its characters helps ground their stories in a reality that feels like it could exist. It makes the world feel authentic and lived in, which is a common comment in reviews. This deeply ingrained knowledge of the land and its people helps me avoid slipping into overly generic prose.
Of course, there is a downside to writing what you know. If I only wrote what I truly know, you would be reading about positron emission tomography for five chapters, with perhaps an entire chapter devoted to the antineutrino. To be fair, I might still write that. I sometimes like to call quantum physics “fantasy physics.”
Yet if we only write what we know, then who could ever describe riding a dragon? Who could conjure up a healing spell? Fantasy does not exist if we restrict ourselves to lived experience. The same is true for crime thrillers. Very few homicide detectives take up fiction writing, and yet the genre thrives.
If you check a writer’s Google search history you will see exactly what they do not know. In fact, do not check their search history at all, because you might set off alerts with the FBI.
The truth is, you do not need to “know” in the factual sense. You need to imagine convincingly. For instance, I have never fought in a medieval battle, but I can research weapons, study historical accounts, and channel my own experiences of fear or adrenaline into the scene.
I have also never been part of a medieval naval conflict. Yet they appear in my book after countless hours of reading about medieval warfare at sea, watching documentaries, realizing the experts were probably speculating as well, and then reading a little more.
One of the bigger challenges comes with writing lived experiences of characters. Especially in matters of sexuality, gender, or even simply trying to see the world from the opposite sex’s point of view. It can be difficult to do this without asking questions, listening carefully, and using empathy. Women do not all need saving, and men do not all need to be heroes. Sometimes it is the cat who matters most.
The real value is in blending both approaches. Write what you know emotionally and psychologically, while exploring what you do not know through research and imagination. That is how you create work that feels both authentic and expansive.
I will never stop writing what I know, or what I invented so that I could know it. At the same time, and this will never stop amazing me, I will always be confronted with what I do not know. The only thing I can promise is that I will keep striving to find out.