The idea of “write what you know” has always been advised as a good practice for writing. It encourages you to enjoy the wealth of your inherited or lived experiences, either on their own or fused with imaginative elements, to create engaging stories infused with the specific only you can provide.
In recent years, however, this rule has become more earnest, almost a mandate. Authors are advised to not just write what you know, but “write only what you know,” meaning “stay in your lane.”
Why? Publishing has long been predominantly male and white-centric. Finally, if slowly, the industry is widening to make necessary room for diverse voices.
So, while this overcorrection isn’t unfounded, it does present a problem: Writers are now unclear about what they’re “allowed” to do.
> What does “write what you know” even mean?
> How can you still write stories you find engaging that are outside your lived experience without getting cancelled?
This is where the concept of “Write what you know” should be viewed as an invitation, not a rule.
No artist should be forced into confines; yet all artists should use this time as an opportunity to recognize how they can capitalize on what makes them unique while also consciously identifying their motivation and methods for writing about things they don’t know personally. This ensures they’re treating them with accuracy and respect as good literary citizens.
Rather than feel stifled, it’s a time to embrace the richness of one’s life and enjoy being part of a system that is embracing all the voices doing the same.
By design, fiction means fabrication using the medium of story. At the core of every story is an examination of the human condition.
When written with creativity, nuance, and authenticity, stories do as they’re meant to: share a fully realized world in which readers can lose themselves, learn, and grow.
Writers operate on a continuum of “knowns” when crafting work, from using their real-life experiences as a basis, to basing the book on reality with invented situations, to making the whole thing up. It’s good to look at the degrees of what’s known to determine how to proceed in your fiction.
Some writers interrogate their life experiences to go on a journey of discovery similar to memoir or autofiction but under the auspices of novel to allow them the bend and sway of creativity as needed.
⇒ Eileen Myles’ Inferno is about her 1970s young adulthood when she came into her queerness and creativity.
⇒ Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is often referred to as an “autobiographical novel.”
Other authors invent new situations and infuse them with elements of what they know:
⇒ Nicholas Christopher’s Somewhere in the Night features Los Angeles, a city he had not ever visited.
⇒ One Lit Place writing coach Thea Sutton set her novel, The Women of Blackmouth Street, in gothic Victorian England and Boston despite being alive 140 years after the fact.
⇒ Another One Lit Place coach, Sally Cooper, wrote intimately and beautifully about the artist Agnes Martin and Ellen, a young Black woman in 1870s Ontario, Canada in her third novel, With my Back Against the World.
When writer Pascale Potvin wrote “Baby Fever,” a short story about an ectopic pregnancy, she hadn’t experienced such a thing herself, but she tapped into fear, anger, and loss, emotions she knew from her own life.
Pascale Potvin writes, “Writing what you know in essence comes down to speaking to the human experience.”
When you write, you need to do it with understanding and love for the characters you create—whom you base on what you know to be true.
Even if you haven’t been married, lived in Fiji, or fought in the French Revolution, you still have enough experience being human to create authentic characters, pinpoint their problems, design relationships, and research the rest.
Some writers delight in going completely off the grid into the invented.
With utopian/dystopian or speculative fiction, fantasy and romantasy, and horror you get to world-build from the ground up, escaping to another time, place, and situation of your own making.
⇒ China Mieville, The Bas-Lag books
⇒ Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Cage of Souls
⇒ Dan Simmons, The Hyperion Cantos
No matter what situation you create, however, it’s still based on what you know to be true about humanity.
As for the made-up? Handling that invented or acquired knowledge to ensure it reads authentically, accurately, and in detail is simply the magic and the art of storytelling.
In recent years, the reading public has asked whether writers have the “right” to write about topics or communities to which they don’t natively belong: other ethnic backgrounds, abilities, genders, sexual orientation, and religion.
Some feel it’s not appropriate to write characters of other communities believing:
If a writer is not part of a culture and does not have a first-hand embodied, or even inherited, understanding of a culture, the concern is it may lead to that writer inadvertently or sloppily flattening the experience of that culture, verge into stereotype, or disseminate reductive views or inaccuracies—inaccuracies that become part of the dominant understanding of that culture and influence social perceptions.
Chantal Cheung in Nupolitical magazine notes that author Rainbow Rowell in her novel Eleanor & Park “perpetuate[s] stereotypes and contribute[s] to the fetishization of East Asians, as well as depict[s] a toxic power dynamic between an interracial couple as an example of romance.”
Cheung says: “Throughout the book, there is constant focus on Park’s otherness. His mixed-race identity is often reduced down to a plot device for the white protagonist to fetishize and project upon.”
One may also find problematic that when an author who is not of a community writes a book about or features a protagonist from that community, it in effect lends the author a kind of authority for that community.
When, for example, a writer writes characters from a marginalized community or sets a book in a community they were not born into or with which they don’t have extensive lived experience, the concern is this outsider’s one-step remove may infiltrate their treatment of the setting or characters with some degree of otherness, which then reinforces that “otherness” for the reading public.
In a world filled with division and chasms between people, where otherness can lead to disdain or even hate, these books can inadvertently widen those gaps and do harm.
When a person comes from a family or a group that has been marginalized, when she is one of the “subalterns,” the silence such a person confronts about herself and her experiences within the greater culture is a political condition. In such cases, the very act of writing about herself and her experiences becomes a political act.
David Mura, “The Search for Identity” in A Stranger’s Journey, shared by Cynthia Robinson Young in Grist Journal
In Jeanne Cummins’ American Dirt, a Vox writer says, “Cummins had written a story that was not hers — and, according to many readers of color, she didn’t do a very good job of it. In fact, she seemed to fetishize the pain of her characters at the expense of treating them as real human beings.”
Chicana writer Myriam Gurba takes Cummins to task for “(1) appropriating genius works by people of color; (2) slapping a coat of mayonesa on them to make palatable to taste buds estados-unidenses and (3) repackaging them for mass racially ‘colorblind’ consumption.” Her claim is Cummins wrote “a “road thriller” that wears an I’m-giving-a-voice-to-the-voiceless-masses merkin.”
Broadly speaking, while there is seeming unlimited room for every manner of story from every walk of life to exist, logistically, it’s those with access to publishing whose voices we come to know and whose stories stand in for the greater whole.
As an example of cultural dominance in publishing, as of 2023, the American publishing industry (the gatekeepers and arbiters of which projects make it to the shelves) was 72.5% white (and this is up from 79% in 2015).
Further exacerbating the issue, largely speaking, the writers with the means to allocate the time and money to hone their craft, attend MFAs or private writing programs, and spend the requisite hours writing, submitting their work, networking, and working with editors are logically the ones whose manuscripts make it into literary agents’ hands and get sold to publishers.
With limited budgets resulting in ever-fewer titles being published, reduced space on the shelf for “risky” projects (e.g. books written by unknown authors), and limited marketing dollars publishers have for championing books, the potential for authors from marginalized communities to break through and get their voices heard is also less.
This means when advantaged writers write about other communities, it’s their voices that largely get heard, it’s their books that get the valuable real estate on the shelf, and it’s through their perspectives we learn about these communities.
Fortunately this tide is shifting, and agents and publishers are actively seeking a much more diverse roster of authors, but the shift is still slow.
Remember, “Write what you know” is an invitation to consider your role, your motivation, and to undertake greater care as a literary citizen. It does not mean you should stay in your lane.
Instead, leave that lane and leave it with gusto—getting to know that about which you’re curious is a beautiful way to bring the world further into communion and compassion.
The following books were all written with protagonists of other genders than their authors. These illustrate how treading into another community with compassion, careful research, and in-depth complexity makes for a truly successful story—regardless (or perhaps because of) the authors having written what they know.
Without authors brave enough to learn, study, and forge ahead into unfamiliar territory, we would not have some of the world’s greatest stories or some of literature’s most memorable characters. Writers are truth-tellers, and sharing worlds that feel authentic and balanced is the work of a true artist.
Even in situations where identity expertise might be real and relevant, it doesn’t justify having only Black writers on projects with Black protagonists, any more than it would justify having only white writers when the main characters are white. So long as you’ve got a good ear and a supple imagination, the rule is: What you don’t know, you can work up. We don’t want an approach in which writers and characters must match up, one to one, in their racial or ethnic identities. That way lies a system in which Shonda Rhimes doesn’t get to write a series centered on the white surgeon Meredith Grey; in which George Eliot (being neither male nor Jewish) doesn’t get to tell the story of Daniel Deronda. Pretty soon, all storytelling would be confined to autofiction.
Kwame Anthony Appiah, “The Ethicist,” The New York Times
What matters above all else is that you wield your interests responsibly. If you’re drawn to writing about another community, before leaping in, or before stopping yourself, simply ask yourself why.
Would you be appropriating it or celebrating/calling important attention to it (and would that be your right)?
Use that interest to identify what depths you feel you can plumb with a people of whom you are not intrinsically part as opposed to your own.
The answer may lead you to understand that you were looking outward because you were afraid to look inward; that you were interested in “the other” to explore your relationship to it; or that you were considering how you yourself would be perceived if you wrote in a more worldly context than if you had written about your own (“boring”) experiences.
The misconception that it’s boring to write about what you know prevents many writers from having to face what they know but don’t know as well as they could: its flaws, its familiarity, and its vulnerability.
That is when you will recognize whether your reasons for wanting to write outside of what you know are to broaden the world and foster empathy—or to protect yourself.
The former will show you that with empathy and inquiry, you can enjoy learning and sharing the world in your stories. That you can build bridges and use your voice to invite people into that world and make them curious and engaged.
For example, Appiah writes:
Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black, whose title character escapes slavery in 1830s Barbados, is a marvel of craft, research and imagination. The author is from Calgary, of Ghanaian parentage, and we’d be succumbing to racial primordialism — not to mention disserving her accomplishment — if we supposed that her being Black gave her expertise about the world of her novel; she put in the work. (And there are plenty of terrific white characters in the novel, too.)
Perhaps you don’t want to base an entire work on a different community but feature supporting characters whose ethnic, sexual, ability, etc. background is less familiar to you.
Your curiosity and open-mindedness will show you how to write outside what you know correctly: with humility, sensitivity, and compassion.
Coming from this place will spur you on to get to know members of other communities, do abundant research, ask readers from the community for their response and be open to hearing it and making requisite changes to your work, and get sensitivity readers to collaborate with you for balance and authenticity.
Doing this work will also show you how you can champion other authors to help them break through and be able to show us the world from their own perspectives.
The latter will perhaps turn you toward going broader, deeper, and further into the familiar: territory that is new and unknowable despite it seeming so close to home.
This is why it’s important for writers to recognize and act responsibly in community with one another, to be able to ask for each other for the input and wisdom we may lack as individuals, but that serve to bring us together. We write alone, but being a writer is a community act.
Ultimately you will never be able to stray too far from the idea of “write what you know”, even if you make up most of what arrives to the page.
What you know, what you don’t know you know, or what you know you want to know, is the beauty and art of balancing authenticity and creativity in fiction, and it is what makes us all know that much more about the world.
We are here to partner with you so you can tell your stories. Our 4-month novel program, personalized writing coaching, and numerous other services are all designed to support you in the exact ways you need.
We will help you see your stories take shape so you can share them with the world. Reach out to see how we can help! ↓
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