5th July 2016 | for Creatives | write what you know, writing, Ricky Gervais |
"It's about making the ordinary extraordinary. It's my favorite thing really."
"That's what fiction is for; role-play for the soul. We create heroes and villains for them to be rewarded or punished. No one really gets hurt."
"If people think that fiction is limited to being able to speak only from your own experiences, that's a very small role for fiction. You can speak from a writer's point of view or from a reader's point of view, but however you slice it, it's a smaller world if you subscribe to that belief. As a writer, trying to write stories, I can't believe that's true. I would not be able to get up and work if I believed that was true."
"Write what you know really means that a writer has to mine her personal experiences for the thoughts and emotions to make the fictional situations of a novel feel realistic. This includes events and personality traits in the author's own experience, plus those she observes in other people's lives. Emotions, insecurities, personality quirks, events that affect people's lives... these are universal."
"Conveying something through fiction, conveying something through a medium that is based on exaggerations of the truth, of even straight-out lies in the hopes of attaining something better, in hopes of glimpsing the future, then you would almost necessarily have to write outside of your own experience."
"What I find to be very bad advice is the snappy little sentence 'Write what you know,' ...It is the most tiresome and stupid advice that could possibly be given. If we write simply about what we know, we never grow. We don't develop any facility for languages, or an interest in others, or a desire to travel and explore and face experience head on. We just coil tighter and tighter into our boring little selves. What one should write about is what interests one."
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