by Shannon Fox
(This was originally posted up on my other blog, http://feelingfoxy-lifestyle.blogspot.com , on August 17th, 2011. In an attempt to streamline the content on both, this entry has been reposted here.)
Yesterday I had a conversation with someone. I told her I was writing a play about a prison psychologist who is counseling an inmate. She asked if I had any experience with any of that. Of course I had to say no-I have never been a prison psychologist, a student of psychology, a prisoner, or a murderer.
One of the great tenets of writing has always been to write what you know. But, if we all wrote about what we knew we wouldn’t have half the books that we do. I’m sure there’s someone out there who knows what it’s like to fight the greatest dark wizard of all time or fall in love with a vampire. But that person isn’t J.K. Rowling or Stephanie Meyer. Rowling doesn’t know what it’s like to fly on a hippogriff any more than Meyer knows what it’s like to give birth to a half-vampire baby. Orson Scott Card (Ender’s Game Series) doesn’t know what it’s like to be a child soldier training in space or the savior of the human race. Jodi Picoult (My Sister’s Keeper) doesn’t know what it’s like to have your parents forcing you to donate your bodily material to your sister. Suzanne Collins (The Hunger Games Series) doesn’t know what it’s like to fight to stay alive in a dystopian world. Bram Stoker (Dracula) didn’t know what it would be like to be a guest of Dracula. George Orwell (1984, Animal Farm) didn’t have a time machine that allowed him to visit the world as it would be in 1984. Agatha Christie (Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple Series) was no renowned criminal investigator. Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes) was a writer, not a detective. Mary Shelley (Frankenstein) didn’t know what it was like to bring something to life that terrified and filled her with shame. Richard Wright (Native Son) never murdered a white girl. Justin Cronin (The Passage) never lived through a vampire apocalypse. Phillip Pullman (His Dark Materials Series) didn’t have a daemon by his side while penned his famous trilogy. Cormac McCarthy (The Road) never wandered through a post-apocalyptic world.
So if these authors didn’t write about what they knew, how did they do it? With time, research, and where research failed, imagination. And of course, an understanding of the human condition.
To write a great novel or series of novels, you need not have traveled far and wide or seen great things. You simply need to understand what it is to be alive. That’s all characters need, wherever they be. Life.
Shannon Fox - Author 
When I think “write what you know” I don’t relate it in quite the same way. I may not have ever been a vampire but I have taken soup through a straw and felt the viscous fluid enter my mouth, roll across my tongue and slide down my throat. That experience can be related to a vampire sucking blood from a character.
If I’m going to make a character believable, I include things like that, which we have all experienced, and that makes it all much more real for the reader. You are right, you don’t have to be a plumber or a doctor to write about one.
🙂
I usually think “write what you like.” To me, “write what you know” means finding an emotional truth. I’m not dissing finding the right, honest core to a story, but I find it much more pleasurable to write about what I like to write about, and, usually, the emotional truth comes with it.