12th June 2016 | for Creatives | Bill Cheng, write what you know, writing |
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Every book is in some way about the author even if it's not about the author."
"Write what you want to write. Write what you need to write. Write what engages you, what interests you, what gets your blood pumping and your jaw tight. Because what else are you going to do? Platy it safe? Write what everybody else is writing just because everybody else is writing it? What's the point? Why bring nothing new to the table? Why fail to bring yourself and your passions to the page?"
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