ornoth | Do you know what you wrote?

I thought I'd share an edited version of a posting I sent to my DargonZine writers.

I recently read an article on A List Apart, a Web designer site, whose angle was on improving how people write. It was specifically addressed to people who write weblogs, but it might be interesting for you to peruse. The article is http://www.alistapart.com/stories/writebetter/.

However, there was one suggestion in there that was a bold statement that I thought I'd bring up. It goes like this:

The advice “write only what you know” increases the likelihood that you will know the same things forever.

Now, I'm a big proponent of "write what you know", because those are the only things that you're going to have unique and revealling insights about. Furthermore, that understanding is what permits you to create interesting, plausible details and imagery about things you know. For me, being a good writer means being an astute and insightful observer of the world around you, and sharing those observations in your writing. How can you ever convincingly write a mangrove swamp or a three-masted schooner if you've never observed them for yourself? How can you plausibly write a character of the opposite gender, if you've never been inside one's head? My answer is: you probably can't do it credibly, and you certainly can't do it compellingly.

A meager substitute for direct observation is, of course, research. But I see that as changing the "what you know" side of the equation. Research is how we can succeed at writing about things that we know nothing about. But it's not the same quality as direct personal experience and observation. Research can allow you write about an unfamiliar topic credibly, though probably not compellingly.

And for me, the whole pithy saying (about never learning anything new because you write what's familiar) breaks down when you realize that writing is most definitely not the primary way any of us learns about the world. I can still "write what I know" without stagnating, because most of what I know, I learned not through writing about it, but through living, observing, and experiencing it in my real life.

So my corollary would be something like this: Writing what you don't know, without trying to fully "know" it, only demonstrates to others the limitations of your knowledge.

I know there are folks who take a less conservative view of "writing only what you know", but I thought I'd share, nonetheless. For me, my writing is heavily based on sharing my unique insights and observations with the reader, so writing beyond what you know is doomed to mediocrity at best.