Author tip: Write what you want to know

Likely the first advice every aspiring author hears is, “Write what you know.”

On the face of it, this is excellent advice. No one has as vivid insight into a scene, setting or situation as the person who’s lived it. That firsthand knowledge authenticates your writing.

Ignorance does not. I once picked up a novel by a famous author. I eagerly anticipated being immersed in her brilliant storytelling.

I never made it past Chapter 1.

The opening scene revolved around a reporter and a newspaper office. I have worked in newspapers for nearly 40 years as both a reporter and an editor. I couldn’t get past the multiple errors in how reporters and a newspaper work. She didn’t write what she knew. She wrote the fantasy version of reporters from TV and movies. That’s not real. It ruined the story for me, someone who does know.

Does that mean we are stuck writing only what we already know? Please, no. The words right after, “Write what you know” should be, “Research what you want to know.”

Details are important. What’s the history? How does it work? How does it smell, sound, taste or feel? Who are the people who do this thing and why do they?

You don’t need to cram all those details into your novel; that would bog down your story into boredom. When I read “Moby Dick,” it felt like that for every chapter of story, there were two chapters of whaling history, procedure, technique, and minutia. Interesting to know, yes, but internally, I’d be screaming, “Let’s get back to the story!”

My opinion: Write what you know, learn all you can about what you don’t know, and let all that knowledge shape how you write about a person, event or thing.

I also consulted comments made in various places by famous authors. Here’s their take:

• Dan Brown: “You should write something that you need to go and learn about. Make the writing process a learning process for you.”

• P.D. James: “You absolutely should write about what you know. There are all sorts of small things that you should store up and use; nothing is lost to a writer. You have to learn to stand outside of yourself. All experience, whether it is painful or whether it is happy is somehow stored up and sooner or later it’s used.”

• Toni Morrison: “Don’t pay any attention to (write what you know). First, because you don’t know anything and second, because I don’t want to hear about your true love and your mama and your papa and your friends. Think of somebody you don’t know. What about a Mexican waitress in the Rio Grande who can barely speak English? … Things way outside their camp. Imagine it, create it. Don’t record and editorialize on some event that you’ve already lived through.”

• Mohsin Hamid: “It may be that the DNA of fiction is, like our own DNA, a double helix, a two-stranded beast. One strand is born of what writers have experienced. The other is born of what writers wish to experience, of the impulse to write in order to know.”

• Lee Child: “Very few people know enough to make an exciting story, and very few people can escape the clotted and overcrowded prose that usually results. But ‘Write what you feel’ is good advice—if you’ve ever been scared or worried or angry or ecstatic, for instance, recall those feelings and blow them up to suit the exaggerated needs of your plot.”

And now you know.