Write What You Know

What the heck does that mean, anyway? Does it mean I can't write about anything that hasn't happened to me? If it doesn't involve the Midwest or lawyers or writers or book-selling, am I out of my depth?

The answer, of course, is that this rule is not to be interpreted literally. I have heard E. L. Doctorow say that any writer of fiction should be able to write about any period in history after reading only a single sentence written from that time. He was telling his audience that writers are blessed with active imaginations for a reason. I need only enough familiarity with my subject matter to give the reader the feeling that I have some idea of what I am talking about.

You can achieve most of what you need through a little bit of research, a smidgen of intuition, and a judicious use of imagination. What you want to avoid-what the rule is really all about-is trying to write a story in which the central elements rely on extensive life knowledge that you don't have. So, for example, you don't want to tackle a story in which the lead character is a doctor trying to cure cancer and where a consideration of various current advances in medicine is central to the plot if you don't know anything about doctors or cancer or medicine and don't want to research all three extensively. You want to write about aspects of the human condition that you are comfortable exploring or inhabiting over the course of your book.

From Sometimes the Magic Happens by Terry Brooks.