“Write what you know” is a favorite mantra heard in creative writing classes.
But here is what a distinguished fiction editor at a major publishing house told me: “I’m so tired of reading undigested autobiography.”
She wasn’t talking about my work. She was talking about the endless stream of manuscripts sent to her by hopeful (or uninformed) agents, in which the client/writer, lacking a plot, tries to turn his own life experience into a novel.
Hemingway did that, and so did Fitzgerald, but it rarely works for less talented writers.
So how can those folks write a novel?
One author suggested that new, usually young writers should write about what they don’t know—people in history, people in fantasy worlds, creatures that never existed outside the writer’s imagination.
Here’s the thing: “Write what you know” can mean more than what you know about your own, probably limited experience: your family life, your high school years, your teenage crush on some unattainable popular guy or girl.
It means write what you know about human beings. If you are paying attention—and you really need to do that—you will have already acquired a pretty fair notion of how your fellow hominoids behave. You will have encountered love, hate, fear, jealousy—all the emotions that feed a novel, that make your characters come alive. You will have met people who are intelligent or not so intelligent. You will have seen kindness and cruelty.
That is what you know.
What you don’t know—what you lack—is an “idea” for your novel other than your own rather uneventful life story.
My first post on this site, “Where Do You Get Your Ideas?”, deals with this issue.
Something more to keep in mind: most published books are nonfiction. Most successful books are nonfiction. And you probably know something about some topic that will have a bigger audience than undigested autobiography.