In the previous post, I wrote about the problem of taking “write what you know” literally and what you can do instead.
There is another interpretation that can help writing feel more visceral and realistic. “Write what you know” is practically useless when it comes to cold hard facts, but can be a useful tool if applied to our emotional experiences. Bear with me; I’ll try to stop this from becoming too wishy-washy. Remember that feeling of disappointment when you were passed over for an award or a promotion or a raise? How about when you discovered someone you liked already had a partner? How exactly did that feel? Was it a feeling of free fall or a weight in your stomach or a tightness in your throat or a heaviness in your limbs? Physical cues for emotions can be incredibly useful in fiction.
Let’s see an example of this in action. I will give you two (probably mediocre but hopefully you get the idea) pieces of text describing the same emotion:
He felt sad.
His legs collapsed, sending him sprawling to the floor. A half-swallowed gasp squeezed its way out of his painfully tight throat.
The first one tells us very little. The second one, within the context of a story, tells us much more about the character himself, how he physically reacts to sadness. There are also different levels of sadness, which the first example doesn’t capture. The second one, however, tells us this is an extremely potent form. The first guy could just be sad there were no apples left at the supermarket, while the second guy could have just lost a loved one. Paying attention to our reactions to emotions is the best possible interpretation of “write what you know”. Watching other people can also help, but I’d advise you not to do this in, shall we say, socially unacceptable scenarios.
Bad novels (although readers have different interpretations of what is a bad novel) are often perceived to be so because they feel false to the reader. Something is off. The author doesn’t appear to have a clear grasp on human behaviour or emotion. This can happen if the characters don’t quite react realistically to what is being thrown at them, and is often a result of the author not paying enough attention to the nuances of how mind and matter interact to create emotion. We all run into this problem at some time or another with our own writing. It can be hard to perfectly capture how a character is feeling in a given moment. I suck at it myself.
Interpreting “write what you know” as an invitation to incorporate our own emotional experiences into our writing is far more helpful than taking the advice to mean knowledge of facts which, while important, generally aren’t that difficult to find. Emotional experience, however, when incorporated into a story, can make even the most outlandish tale feel real to the reader.