Write What You Love
Going Beyond Writing What You Know
One of the first things you’re told at the first mention of wanting to be a writer is:
“Write what you know."
I’ve always hated that advice. Not because it isn’t true but because it is only one tiny part of a rather complicated formula to the craft.
Through my years slogging through the worlds of fiction and non-fiction, educational, technical, and content writing I’ve discovered that “Write what you know,” is entirely too vague and deserves further definition.
Write Within Your Scope
Taken at face value, if writers only wrote what they know we would be missing whole genres of fantasy, sci-fi, urban fantasy, and even murder mysteries. I’ll go out on a limb and say that most authors of crime thrillers are not, themselves, serial killers. Writing what you know has nothing to do with writing within your scope.
Scope in this application means the farthest stretches of your imagination. Most might assume a writer’s creative capacity is boundless and, in some ways it is. Our ability to craft worlds from words is the very heart of our process. For many of us, we have endless stories, worlds, and characters in our heads waiting to be discovered and set free via our writing. A writer’s creative capacity is astounding, to be sure; it just might not be omnidirectional.
A prolific author of historical fiction might find herself floundering attempting to write sci-fi. A true crime writer may be utterly aghast at the notion of writing an erotic romance. Of course, none of these assumptions are universal. Many talented creators write across genres effortlessly.
But to write within your scope means first assessing and internalizing what it is your creativity can conjure. By understanding what it is your mind tends to construct, you can focus those base elements of story craft.
Any fight scene I have written to date is grotesquely underwhelming. If an editor were wanting a fast-paced, bang-boom-wow fight in any of my stories, I’d be hard-pressed to crank out a convincing scene. It is not my cup of tea, nor a part of any of my interests, writing or otherwise.
That does not make me less of a writer. It means I have a weakness at best and a blind spot at worst for writing action-thrillers or war-time, battle-driven pieces. Those are never really going to be my forte. By acknowledging that these types of things are outside my scope, I know I’m unlikely to find success or fulfillment in genres that depend upon such scenes.
This is not to say I am excused from the need to work on my fight scenes. In the effort to fine-tune my writing, it is important I continue to exercise those weak parts of my writerly muscles. The more I work at it, the better I get and the further my scope expands.
Writing within your scope allows you to really hone in on the passion that started your writing in the first place.
Write To Your Strengths
One of the first stories I wrote as a burgeoning author was an angsty teen love story messily splattered against an emo black, safety-pinned stabbed backdrop. As with most writers' early offerings, it sucked, generally speaking. Within the first few paragraphs, it was clear I had no idea what love was, how it was supposed to feel or what the hell you are supposed to do about it once you're in it. Having never known that type of complicated, romantic love all I could do was approximate. And I did a piss poor job of it at that.
However, the piece was not entirely without merit. I may have been clueless about the intricacies of relationships but I managed to record the frustrating, disconnected feeling of being a teenager pretty well. It is raw and loose as far as prose goes but impactful nonetheless.
Without knowing it I’d written to my strength. I was an angsty, conflicted, hormonal mess painted with runny black eyeliner and deep purple lippy. I felt emotions much more strongly then, as do most teenagers. I captured that brilliantly. Even through my adult eyes the piece immediately evoked that gut-wrenching tension of being caught between worlds: not really a kid anymore but neither a functioning adult.
Does that mean I had no business writing a love story? Not by any stretch of the notion. It just means that I would have needed to do a lot more research into how it should look and feel to the reader, mostly through reading if garnering the actual experience was outside my means. In today’s technological marvel age, it also means researching online but those were tools not available to my thirteen-year-old self.
Write What You Love
When I made the commitment to begin adding content to Medium, I sat down with my husband to brainstorm what I could offer to such a vast and varied community. He asked a simple question.
“What are you an expert in?”
After some thought, I came to the conclusion I would struggle to call myself an expert in any one topic. I have a great deal of life experience in some niche markets. I’m deep in the trenches of others, lending first-hand experience and hard-won victories in the battles of parenting, marriage, writing, and self-employment. Perhaps it is my own proclivity to imposter syndrome, but I firmly believe anecdotal evidence and time-in-service do not an expert make.
So he offered a different version of the same question.
“What things do you love the most?”
That got my synapses firing left and right. Within an hour I had a whiteboard full of ideas for contributions to Medium, my personal writing and maybe even a chapter or two of a memoir should one of those ever come to fruition. I may not be an expert in a classical sense but I can offer up the love I have.
This same idea can be translated into writing. We create the strongest, most realistic characters and settings by first drawing inspiration from those things we love the most. More aptly from those things we feel most strongly about since the emotion attached may not be love. I admit some of my most intense, love-to-hate-’em antagonists have their roots in vicious bosses and vile ex-boyfriends.
We can breathe life into our stories by drawing upon those strong emotions we understand deep in our souls. I know joy because of my children. I know love because of my husband and my mother. I can say that I undoubtedly understand those things. Using that knowledge I can weave those emotions into my writing for richer, more vital storytelling.
On the other hand, I’ve, thankfully, never lost a close family member to death. The grieving process has never really settled on my shoulders. So writing a character who must grieve the loss of her husband or children would not come so quickly. However, with all love comes fear. I would need to filter my fear of losing my loved ones into that character to write a convincing emotional hook. Do I innately understand that level of grief? No, and I pray I have many more years until I must. But I can still write what I understand of love and all the complex feelings that accompany that love into my works to draw the reader in.
You will be able to create far more intricate pieces by writing the things you know about. And, as with all things, the more life you live, books you read, topics you study, and experiences you enjoy, the more you know. But writing is more than just a rendering of the gross accumulation of your knowledge. It is translating those deeply-felt emotions into words that evoke the same in your reader. It is understanding where you can focus your time, talent, and energy for the most fulfillment and enjoyment.
Don’t just write what you know. Write within your scope, write to your strengths, and, most importantly, write what you love.
Gwenna Laithland is an independent journalist, humorist, and freelance writer in Oklahoma. She writes contemporary sci-fi and is working on her debut novel, Beyond the Sky.
