WRITE WHAT YOU LIKE

by John M. Floyd

Throughout the sixteen years of my so-called career as a writer, one of the pieces of advice I’ve heard most often is write what you know. And I agree with that, at least in theory. The more familiar you are with a subject, the more believable you’re likely to be. I’m sure one reason John Grisham’s novels are successful is the time he spent working in the same field as many of his characters, and the same might be said of Robin Cook, Kathy Reichs, Joseph Wambaugh, Dick Francis, and many others.

But I don’t think writers should feel bound to the “write what you know” rule. I believe a much better version of that advice is: write what you like to write, and what you like to read, and what you feel comfortable writing. In my opinion, good fiction is a product more of imagination than personal experience. Remember, Tom Clancy was an insurance salesman; he never even served in the military. And Rob mentioned in his column a few weeks ago the German author Karl May, who wrote most of his stories about the riproaring Old West but never set foot there.

The Walter Mitty syndrome

The problem with writing only about what you know is that many of us haven’t lived lives that are interesting or exciting enough to sustain a piece of fiction, and certainly a piece of suspense fiction. Maybe that’s what drove Clancy and May to stretch their horizons a bit. Marie Anderson once said, in an article for The Writer, “I used to write what I know. I used to write about infertility, motherhood, suburban middle-class life, blue-collar Catholic childhood, law school from a dropout’s perspective. I’d send out those stories and never see them again, not even the SASEs. Then, somewhere, I came across a better rule: Know what you write.”

What kinds of things do I know, to write about? Well, I’m pretty familiar with the South, and marriage and parenthood, and certain hobbies and sports, and the Air Force and IBM and some areas of computer technology. And my travels in the military and with my job have helped a little, I suppose. But the truth is, I’ve probably written more fiction about places I haven’t visited than those I have, and I’ve written relatively few stories that deal with familiar career subjects like financial applications and software design. What I do do, now and then, is start a story with something that I know and then detour into areas a little more foreign — and almost certainly more interesting.

Beyond this point there be tygers

Examples? Well, I’ve written and published stories about or including the following subjects: serial killers, time machines, park rangers, ghosts, UFO sightings, cattle drives, jewelry heists, terrorists, convents, political campaigns, alien invasions, rock bands, murder for hire, mountain climbing, carnivals, gunfighters, online dating services, insurance fraud, Bengal tigers, disc jockeys, space travel, arson, the Civil War, animal research, exotic poisons, angels, locked-room murders, hypnotism, escaped pythons (snakes on a plain?), death rays, railroads, bounty hunters, the Alaskan wilderness, jailbreaks, night watchmen, bomb squads, oil barons, Japanese detectives, police corruption, castaways, stagecoach robberies, scuba diving, axe-murders, England in the early 1900s, monsters, mobsters, ocean liners, the Alamo, casino gambling, and futuristic lie detectors.

As you might guess, few of those topics were familiar to me, beforehand. What I needed to know I learned from others, or from reference books and maps and online resources. With the proper research, what you don’t know can become what you know. The very fact that you’ve increased your comfort level with a particular subject can improve the quality and flow of your writing.

Sometimes, though . . .

Sometimes you can tapdance your way through difficult subject matter without having to reveal a lot of in-depth knowledge. Do your best, certainly; research the facts, be as credible as you can . . . but don’t obsess too much about it.

I’ll close with a quote I think I used once in an earlier column: According to Lawrence Block, “Ninety-eight percent of your readers won’t know whether the information is accurate or not, and the rest won’t care.”

Write what you know? My advice is, write what you know you’ll enjoy writing.