write what you know
"We give a lot of advice to young writers: Read a lot. Study the classics. Write about what you know. Show, don't tell. But danger lies in teaching too much and warning too little. Rarely do we tell the would-be wordsmith: This is a hard road you're taking. Are you sure it is the one for you? Is there anything else, anything at all, you'd also enjoy doing? If so, go and do it. The world is wide open to you. Spare yourself the agony, young one."
— Nicki Porter
for Creatives | creating isn't easy, write what you know, writing, Nicki Porter
"We always write from partial knowledge."
— Don Fry
"Memory is a form of fiction."
— Vladimir Nabokov
for Creatives | write what you know, writing, Vladimir Nabokov
"Cut your heart out of your chest, clutch it in your fist, and slam it down onto the paper. That is the real meaning of write what you know, which is probably written as, write with total fucking honesty. Take all that shit that lurks inside you, all your fears and wants and experiences, all your neuroses and psychoses and loves and loathings, all your hopes and dreams and memories, and inject 'em into your work." (artist)
— Chuck Wendig (art by Cheyenne)
for Creatives | creating isn't easy, artist integrity, creative fear, art, artists, write what you know, writing, Chuck Wendig, Cheyenne
"Authors have told excellent stories based on subjects they cannot know."
— Chuck Wendig
for Creatives | write what you know, writing, storytelling, Chuck Wendig
"It's about making the ordinary extraordinary. It's my favorite thing really."
— Ricky Gervais
"All good novelists have bad memories."
— Graham Greene
for Creatives | artist in the art, novel writing, write what you know, writing, Graham Greene
"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."
— E. Anne Proulx
for Creatives | create for YOURSELF, language, write what you know, writing, artists must EXPERIENCE, E. Anne Proulx
"The impulse to write is an impulse to order events. You write from the events of real life, which means you write from chaos. But when you write a story, you can take a character from here and something that's happening from there... and put it all together. You can order it in a way that you can't order what happens in your life. Just for that minute it's very rewarding."
— Lee Smith
for Creatives | creative process, write what you know, Lee Smith
"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."
— Bill Cheng
"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."
— Jeni Chappelle
for Creatives | novel writing, write what you know, Jeni Chappelle, writing
"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."
— Bill Cheng