Write what you Know?

I agree - that's the hardest part about writing Lit Fic for me.

Most of what my MC is going through are things that I've never experienced in my life... but if I wrote based on what I have experienced:
1) it would be boring
2) I'd get creeped out because I'd be writing about my life.

NaNo '09: Once We Were Kings

In terms of plot, location and time I usually write what I don't know. I find it strangely exciting to write a scene about Yale University in 1963 and having to look up a biography of the acting master of Trumbull College to reference some known facts about him. I've never been to Yale, I wasn't even born in 1963, know nothing about Trumbull College. So that's the fun part.

When it comes to characterization; personality traits, psychological development, opinions and social commentary, I do write what I know. I don't think I can ever create a truly three-dimensional character if I can't relate to what he's feeling or thinking. I don't think anyone can, really, unless you're a sociologist or psychologist, and even then you're technically writing what you know. Some of the characters in my novel are based upon some of my closest friends, so even then, I write what I know.

I also ramble on Twitter (though sometimes in Dutch).

2008: Junior Boys (won)
2009: Guilt (...?)

I usually write what I know. And therefore I write short stories :0)

But this first attempt at NaNo is giving me the chance to expand what I know to what I think I know and then what I imagine could be. So I have been researching some historic events and groups and places that impact my range of characters just so I can incorporate an appropriate word here, a character name or place name there. And in creating these backstories, I am seeing my characters more clearly and enjoying the diversity of their parts.

So I guess I am giving new legs to the things I know to make them more interesting.

By Nov 25th or so, I will know if it worked!

I'm a big believer in the mystical aspects of fiction writing - those times when the words flow and the images flow to the point that it's like you're channeling them.

NaNoWriMo for me (at least this year) is one big exercise in putting down on the page exactly what just comes to me.

So what came to me?

My main character seems to be Persian. I know very little about Persian culture and after November will need to talk to a LOT of people and do a ton of research...but, this is the person who's speaking to me...

I got the "write what you know" advice but honestly, it's all coming out of our imagination anyway. I think rather than "write what you know," write what you feel - check it later, tweak/rewrite if something just doesn't ring true, but I think at least in the first draft you just have to let it come out!

Write the scene even if something's wrong. And really, anything can be believable on a page if you fix it in the editing - but that's for December !

I understand what a lot of you guys feel. My novel is pretty much 98% of my life and I think it's interesting enough, even though I think my life is pretty boring. (Try wrapping your head around that one lol). I mean, thats what interviews are for- formal ones and informal ones. I know what a lot of things feel like, but I've never been through anything very tragic like losing a mother or father or brother or sister, or being raped or murdering someone. I REALLY have to use my imagination for those things, and sometimes if I can't place myself in that situation it's time for some interviews.

I can't say that I write only what I know (from a phenomenological point of view), since a lot of my story is really a conglomeration of the lives of my schoolmates!

Also, I need to write the male POV a lot. Since I'm a girl, I can't say this is what I know per se. I just hope that what some of my guy friends tell me, as well as my own knowledge in psychology will help me out in writing.

My heart, my life, my praise is all for You

I think you must write about what you care about passionately or what interests you intensely - especially if you're writing a novel. I usually write on historical topics, which is great because I love history and I tend to know a great deal about the periods I write about already. Then the specialized research is (usually) enjoyable. My current project is contemporary, with only a little research needed - mostly legal (ugh!) But the subject is domestic violence and that fires me up. I've not experienced it personally, but I volunteer with a local program so I have plenty of resource material to stimulate my creativity.

I try not to write from my personal life since I want my friends and family to continue talking to me, but inevitably people, places, events, funny experiences, and family stories do come in - quite disguised. I think that is inevitable. I also think that the older you get the easier it is to write about things beyond your own personal experiences. At least that has been true for me. Maybe I'm generalizing my own experience, though.

Out of Ogeeche, 07
Kindred Threads, 08 Winner!

I don't know why people care so much about rules and generalizations. Technically there is no right and wrong in art. When Ulysses was released people thought its an impossible piece of crap and now you can seriously brag, if you made it through ;D.

I personally believe that to some extend you will always write about what you know. Even if your story is placed in a fantasy world or wherever, you still add in your experiences as a human being.

To me you cannot write the situation you are describing "wrong". You can just describe it badly. Millions of dads leave their families and every single one of these situations will be different and every person involved will feel slightly different.
You cannot describe the situation in a universally correct way. As you have probably been left behind at some point in your life though, you can technically empathize with the feeling of desertion. Then you try to remember your feelings as a child or try to envision how you would feel, if someone so profoundly important to you left you, and there you have your description.
Even if you haven't lived through the exact same situation as your characters, you can still puzzle it together.

I agree with itsallchance.

What am I doing still awake?

...Oh wait.

pubrisrachel-- I love that quote! Who is the source?

I think that we can find a sort of happy medium between writing only what we have personally experienced and completely making things up... I agree with those who have said that you can't write an imagined scene "wrong"-- even though you haven't been through the situation, no one else can claim to be your fictional character, so they can't claim to know how things affect that person, right? Every individual reacts to his/her experiences in different ways.

I am writing a story that centers around a generations old family owned clock shop, yet I don't know a thing about clocks... I know about working for a small, family owned business, but I don't want the shop in my story to be the same as the place that inspired the tale... so I changed it to something unfamiliar. I try to take my inspiration from life, and apply the things that I have learned to the creation of something new, and if I need to learn something along the way, I read up on it, or ask someone who knows to explain it to me...

Of course, most of that research crap is for December, right? Except for the people who had it together and did it in October... Now is just about putting down words... That's the glory of November!! Nothing is set in stone, and the only things that are unimaginable in this world are the limits of the imagination... ;)) Yay for a flawed first draft.

I was a professional non-fiction writer (read: journalist) for about four years, and I've learned that the difference between writing what you want to know and writing what you know is research.

And I'm not talking about thumbing through the Wikipedia entry on late Tang-period China or just imagining what it would be like to be a firefighter. The best way to put your characters there is to talk to hang out in a firehouse, talk to firefighters, maybe ride along on a fire. Or to show up at the scene of every fire for year or a month or something like that, and observe them at work, how they interact.

The best way to research late Tang-period China would be to talk to historians, read books, visit China, see the geography and the topography and the culture for yourself.

This is admittedly a little outside the realm of what Nano was designed for. However, it's especially important in literary fiction to apply the principals of method acting (let's call it method writing) because while human experience is easily summarized (Born, grow up, eat a bunch of meals, die), it is described with much more difficulty and much less success.

That description is what puts the literary in literary fiction.

Cheers,
B.

____
Sasquatch hunting should never be undertaken professionally.

yes. alot of great feedback here. i guess i would add that you have to both write what you know, and write what you observe, remember, experience, and dream about. you might have to research a bit for specifics, ask some questions for other details. and trust in that mystical element referenced above and allow yourself to be surprised.

In my personal opinion a writer who doesn't write what they know is useless. The reason I find different writers interesting is because they write about things that are unique to them, and as writers who have lead separate and varied lives we all have something different to offer in terms of experience. All the great writers write about what they know to some degree. William S. Burroughs wrote about being a homosexual and an opiate addict, Ken Kesey wrote about the Northwest and mental institutions, Ernest Hemingway wrote about hunting and fights and races. It's a betrayal of yourself and your readers not to write what you know. Then you're just imagining. Work with absolutely no basis in reality never hits anyone in the real world very hard.

I feel like if I only wrote what I knew, I'd run out of stories. That said, I hit an insane amount of characters with a car, and that has happened to me. My characters are mostly teens, I don't know what else to do with them. I'm not writing Fear Street books over here, my characters do not live in a town where someone starts killing people because it's Tuesday. If I need to maim them a little or kill them off a lot... Car is just way too convenient. I use other methods, too, but car is by far the easiest (maybe because I know it).

Well, there is one story I've worked on that is insanely close to me, as in what I know. The protagonist in that one is a benevolent super-villain in a battle of man vs. self and man vs. society. A lot of her back story is semi-autobiographical.

Thanks everyone!

-anomalie swann-
I was reading a book called What I Call Life by Jill Wolfson, and there were questions the author answered in the back. She said the quote in one of the questions, but I'm not sure if she was the first person to think of that or not. Just the first time I saw it.

i think that's one of those bits of conventional wisdom that works better if you flip it: know what you write.

most importantly, in my experience, know *who* you write.

believe in your characters, and make sure that they are bigger than whatever your story is "about". let them spend some time with you outside the page. if you know a good secluded path or you aren't worried about looking kinda nutty, take a walk with them + let them just talk for a while, without worrying about capturing whatever they have to say on the page. pay attention to their voice, to the kind of things they notice...you know, all the stuff you'd want to pay attention with a relatively new acquaintance when you take a walk with them + listen to them tell you a story + try to figure out what kind of friends the two of you are going to be.

it sounds slightly insane, but i think really getting into your characters this way puts you in a much better position to write from viewpoints you really can't just tap into from your own experience.

for example, i've been working for about 2 1/2 years on a play about a bearded woman performer who is biologically male in the early sixties. these are not things i can be said to "know" about...but the slog through the first draft of this play actually came much more from spending crazy amounts of time with this one imaginary character, rather than in research. i did the bulk of my research between the second and third drafts, when i really knew *who* i was writing about. yes, there were a lot of things where the facts i dug up ended up changing the script considerably, but mostly in the sense that as i read up on carnivals and bearded ladies, i kept stumbling into things that made me go, "oh geez, THAT's what she was trying to tell me about. duh!"

the facts helped me clarify the story that was being told, but the characters were the ones really in charge of telling it.

i think i have more to say on this, but i'm late for work. i might come back + add some stuff later.

The first time I did NaNoWriMo, I set myself the challenge, "write what you know, make up what you don't." I've been reading for years, and it's so easy to research rather than write (ask any doctoral student) so I finally said, "OK, this is the closed book test."

And yes, book knowledge can help you to fake it. Being there helps--no question--but I do remember a monologue I performed from the point of view of a WWI soldier entombed in the wall of a trench, and someone who had been to Verdun came up to me after and asked if I'd been there. She said I captured the sense she had the whole time of walking over bones.

No, I've never been there. But I had immersed myself in the literature of the period, including the first-person accounts of combatants, nurses, and medics.

This year I'm writing American slavery and the German genocides. Very scary, but I've read enough to give me nightmares, and I'm crossing my fingers that I'm getting enough of it right. And if I don't, there's a stack of reference works and a good year and a half of revision to make sure that I do.

"Method writing" is indeed like method acting--yes, I've done both, and playing a character on stage involves the same interior gestures as writing a character from the inside. The best handbooks on characterization are technical works for actors--check out, for example, Uta Hagen. "A challenge for the actor." I use her exercises when I write characters.

Tell all the truth, but tell it slant. (Emily Dickinson)

2009: The Reincarnations of Miss Anne
2008: The Scottish Play, or Fire and Ice

I think it is very hard to NOT write what you know. Most of the ideas and things I have written have come from my own experiences and life, even if I didn't intend for art to imitate life. Sometimes writing brings out a lot of our own subconcious thoughts and feelings, which isn't obvious until you read it. The themes and stories which inspire us to write come from somewhere, there is a reason inside as to why you picked that topic as opposed to something else.

My story is intended to be 100% fiction, but reading back on it I see so many mirrors into my own life, my own family and my own ideas. Evidently there is a lot of things which I needed to research for the story, and cross-check with people who are experts in that area. Although predominantly it is my own creation and it comes from what I know and themes which interest me on a personal level.

I think if I set out to write out about something I didn't know I would lose inspiration quickly and find it very hard to write.

Agreed. (:

I don't experience much of anything I write about.

-insert random song quote here-