Write What You Love, Not What You Know or What You Think Others Want to Read

Writing what you love will help you grow as a writer and experience satisfaction in your writing life while also pleasing your readers

“Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.”

— Kurt Vonegut

We’ve all heard the advice over and over again to write what you know. Then there are those in the other camp who say that this is not the best advice. Some believe that we misunderstand what this adage means or we box ourselves in by interpreting it too literally.

According to writer Dan Brown, you should use what you know but only as a stepping stone. He says, “You should write something that you need to go and learn about. Make the writing process a learning process for you.” I like this way of thinking. It means that we use our writing as one way to grow in our lives and as writers.

Yet even with Brown’s manner of addressing the adage, I think something is missing. As I’ve been struggling with keeping up my daily publishing schedule lately, I’ve been trying to figure out what the problem is. I thought perhaps I was trying to come up with ideas that were too far afield from my background and went back to writing about psychology, the area I trained in, thinking this would help.

At first it did, as it gave me something familiar to fall back on, but soon I was having even more problems coming up with what I thought were interesting topics to write about. Or at least they didn’t seem to be particularly interesting to me, and I suspect if I couldn’t dredge up any interest that my writing was lackluster enough to fail to elicit much interest on the part of readers. Of course, like other writers, I wanted to make sure I was writing articles that others wanted to read.

I decided to take a break from psychology for a while, and try to find something that would be fun to write. The result was a poem based on the Dr. Seuss favorite The Cat in the Hat called, Response by Defendant: Mr. Cat in the Hat to Suit Brought by Plaintiff: Mother of Sally and Brother.

The next time I ran into a roadblock with my writing, I tried this again and managed to come up with a humorous story about missing items that I imagined were purposely disappearing to make me upset enough to give them more benefits, called On the Sneaky Nature of Household Wildlife Longing to Be Free. For the first time in months I was having fun writing.

I began regularly turning to humor when I felt my writing was off. I couldn’t always come up with something funny to write, truthfully I’m just not a very funny person, but more often than not I could figure something out that I enjoyed working on. I won’t say that my humor pieces garnered a ton of engagement from readers, but they did make me love writing again, at least for the time being.

And even though they may not have resulted in a lot of money or an increased reach for my work, they did make me realize something. It’s not about writing what you know. It’s also not primarily about writing what others want to read. It’s about writing what you like, what makes you happy, what gets you to enjoy writing.

What We “Know” At Any Point in Time Is Limited to What Is In Our Short Term Memory

I think focusing only on writing about what we know limits our growth as a writer, and can lead to writers block and stagnation. Part of this is due to us not really being fully aware of all that we “know”. Our working memories can only hold a certain amount of information that we can readily access at any point in time. Much of and the rest goes either into

What is held in our working memory at any point in time is what is most important and most salient in that moment and what our current priorities are. When we attempt to write pieces that frequently, the same information may be in our working memory over a discrete period of time.

This means that what we “know” at that point in time is only a tiny subset of everything that we really know but aren’t aware of. We won’t be able to generate a lot of different ideas for new stories and before long we will feel like we are blocked. So while we may know a whole lot of things, what we can access for our writing in the absence of other inspiration, may be narrow in comparison to everything we actually have stored in our brains regarding all of our experiences, beliefs, opinions and knowledge.

We Think That What We Know Is Limited to Accumulated Knowledge About Specific Subjects

When we think about writing what we know, we often only consider things like academic knowledge, what we’ve studied in school or have a degree in, specific skill sets or things that we can be considered experts at doing. The focus on imparting a certain body of information can cause our prose to feel flat and uninspired to our readers.

I think because we believe it calls for knowledge based topics, it can also hamper or rule out fiction writing and perhaps poetry as well, since poetry emphasizes the creation of strong images and expressing emotions and experiences in a more indirect and representative manner.

The Problem With Trying to Write Just What Others Want to Read

As writers we want to please our readers. So we spend a lot of time trying to figure out what they want us to write, instead of writing what we want to write about. Part of this comes from our natural enterprising spirit which leads us to try to “write to the market” or the idea that we can find holes in the content that’s already available that our readers are just waiting for us to fill.

Trying to always figure out what readers want to read rarely produces any inspired writing because what motivates it is strictly external. The disconnect between what we write and what we want to write is perceived by readers on some level as inauthentic.

When we’re passionate about and interested in what we write, and when it comes from an authentic and genuine place, that translates onto the page. It’s not something we can fake. If we write the story that we are driven to tell instead of just the story we think others want to hear, because of our connection to the material we are related and our joy in writing it, readers will connect with it as well.

Loving What We Write Means We Write What We Know and That Readers Will Connect With It

In the end, I’d amend the advice given in the title slightly. I think we need to focus on different things to ensure the most satisfying and successful writing life possible. Just because you know something, doesn’t mean you want to spend time exploring or writing about it. Forcing ourselves to write about something just because we think we’re supposed to since we are knowledgeable about it will not result in our best work nor will we feel fulfilled when we produce it.

I think eventually writing about something that we don’t enjoy writing about will result in increased writing avoidance leading to lower success and decreasing the positives that we get from writing until we decide we just don’t want to do it anymore. When writing becomes nothing but a chore that we have to do the equivalent of holding our noses and swallowing to make ourselves do it, it becomes easier to let it go.

When we identify a topic that we have a certain degree of excitement or passion about, we connect with the topic on an emotional level. This means that we are also writing what we know, because it is something that matters to us. We are also writing for our readers in addition to ourselves, since others will perceive our work as being authentic, instead of trying too hard to get them to read it or to explain something on a purely intellectual basis. When we write what we love, then what we know and what others want are naturally wrapped up in the story as well.

In the end, I think what is ultimately in order to satisfy ourselves as well as our readers is this: Write what you know AND love and that will cover all the bases.

Natalie Frank has a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology and often writes about how to create a more satisfying and successful writing life. She is an editor for The Partnered Pen & One Table, One World and is Editor in Chief for Promposity & Mental Gecko, both of which she created. She is also the Managing Editor for Novellas and Serials at LVP Publications.

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