Writing what you know.

copyright: André Goerres
"But then no man ever does realize the true interest of the age in which he happens to live. All sense of proportion is lost, and the little thing hard-by obscures the great thing at a distance. It is easy in the dark to confuse the fire-fly and the star."

- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Everyone has heard the phrase Write what you know.  To which one might reply, Who cares what I know?  This is best answered by defining "Write what you know", and, while there must be many definitions, mine is as follows.

It is not, first of all, simply knowledge.  While one typically writes better if they expound upon their topic, their bank of knowledge alone doesn't make their novel an account of what they know.  When in doubt, there's always the question: do I know it, or did I learn it?  Because knowledge can hurt as well as help.  After historical inaccuracy, "info-dumping" is the number one reason why a historical novel would receive poor reviews. 

What about experience?  Doesn't that constitute "what you know"?  Again, to my mind, experience on its own is not synonymous with what you know.  A person may take a city tour of Boston and remain oblivious to the routes taken or the information they were supposed to learn.  Or, equally likely, they may remember every segment of the tour in detail without fully understanding what they saw.    

In the same vein, mere emotion does not equal "what you know".  While we associate emotion with experience and personal feeling, emotion can as easily be a fundamentally impersonal factor, tacked-on for effect or, worse yet, by seeming necessity.  Sometimes it is used to effect another maxim--"Show, don't tell".  As such, emotion becomes more of a tool than a genuine thought or the driving idea behind the story. 

I believe the only way to truly "write what you know" is to write with your own perspective.  Anybody can write about an experience, emotion, or piece of knowledge, but only you can depict it in the way that you see it.  Your life and thought processes are unique and uniquely yours, which will make your perspective unique, and thereby your story--the story of what you know--unique.

copyright: Fabrice Clerc

If this is so, it still brings us back to the question "Who gives a jot what I know?"  And I find this a relevant and difficult question, especially for a young, unpublished author.  I can name half-a-dozen people in my life who would (and should) make much better novelists than I.  Sometimes my writing career seems useless for this fact alone, and I ask myself, "why don't I give up?"

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a man of contrasts.  In the quote above, he laments the fact that Sir Walter Scott wrote masterful historical fiction and yet did not write about his contemporaries, the soldiers of the Napoleonic Wars.  But after penning "The Final Problem", Doyle demoted his own contemporary masterpiece:

The best literary work is that which leaves the reader better for having read it.  Now, nobody can possibly be the better--in the high sense which I mean it--for reading Sherlock Holmes...It was not to my mind high work, and no detective work ever can be...

From the self-assured, arrogant graduate in A Study in Scarlet, to the retired crimefighter on the brink of WWI in "His Last Bow", Sherlock Holmes was always a contemporary character.  The Victorian-Edwardian setting--modern in its day--teaches 21st-century readers nearly as much as Sherlock Holmes himself does.  And yet Doyle considered it an inferior work to his medieval novels The White Company and Sir Nigel, which have made no long-term cultural impact. 

Had Doyle given up after A Study in Scarlet, or even after "The Final Problem", the world would have lost at least half of the Sherlock Holmes series.  There might never have been a Hound of the Baskervilles, and Doyle's work could have been largely forgotten, only remembered as obscure classic literature.  Instead, Conan Doyle is today recognised as one of the fathers of detective fiction, and his books are read all over the world.  Doyle wrote what he knew and Sherlock Holmes--like all good world literature--became a series for the ages.

Don't hesitate, then, to write what you know because you think nobody will care. Oftentimes we are not the best critics of our own work; we are prone to be too forgiving or, like Doyle, too disparaging.  The main thing is to be true to what you do know--your perspective--and let the truth speak for itself.