"Write about what you know" is an advice often given to fiction writers. Yet, some writers are successful with books about countries and cultures other than their own (or in any event, other than the country and culture where they grew up) -- James Clavell, Pearl S. Buck and Robert van Gulik wrote about Japan and China, Elizabeth George and Martha Grimes write mysteries set in England, Alexander McCall Smith writes about a ladies' detectives agency in Botswana, Tony Hillerman's heroes were Navajos and other Native Americans, Lion Feuchtwanger wrote novels set in, inter alia, Spain, France, and Old-Testament Israel, and Marguerite Yourcenar's and Trevanian's books were practically all over the place, from Japan to France, ancient Rome (in Yourcenar's case) and beyond. So is the old adage just plain wrong -- can you credibly write about what you don't know after all -- or are these books successful just because their respective writers do intimately understand the cultures they write about? Or does it matter whether the author at least comes from a country/ cultural system that is similar to the one (s)he describes?

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