This is the writer’s equivalent to, “Don’t scowl or your face’ll freeze that way.” Everyone’s heard it, but no serious writer believes it. How it became wedged into the consciousness of new writers is anyone’s guess, but if you’re still in that mode of thought, here’s my advice: Reformat that disk.
Think about it for a moment. Did Robert Heinlein go to school on Mars before he wrote Red Planet? Did Alice Sebold die and go to Heaven before she wrote The Lovely Bones? Has Stephen King ever lived with his wife and child in a remote, snowed-in mountain resort with no link to the outside world save a radio and no company but an assortment of resident ghosts? I can’t say for sure, but my guess would be no. If these writers had stuck to writing what they knew, some very entertaining books would never have been written.
I once had an argument with a man (not a writer himself) who insisted that any writer who got a teaching job would find his/her work gradually but inevitably becoming focused on academic life. It was, he insisted, a deathblow to creativity. My mind went to Toni Morrison, Michael Crichton, Philip Pullman, Rod Serling—teachers all. But my friend insisted. “All you can write about is what you live, and if you’re giving lectures and grading papers, that’s what you’re going to write.”
That is, assuming you have no imagination. But if you’re a writer, you do have imagination. You can imagine life in a space station, a 12th-century monastery, a royal court of ancient Egypt, even if you never travel farther than your kitchen. You also know how to do research, how to study and learn. You can write about your real life, but you can also write about a real life experience you’ve never had—and do it convincingly.
My former teacher, the talented fiction writer David Jauss, tells this anecdote. After publication of his powerful story “Freeze” about a young man fighting in Vietnam, he got letters from Vietnam vets trying to comfort him. “I’ve been there, too,” they’d say. “It’s going to be all right, buddy.” The thing is, Jauss never fought in Vietnam. Yet, he wrote about it so authentically that people who had been there assumed he had, too.
Surprising? Not really. You can do it as well: Write about wars you’ve never fought, jobs you’ve never had, people you’ve never known, journeys you’ve never taken, journeys that no actual person could ever take. But first, you have to stop being hemmed in by the worn-out dictate to write what you know and start engaging imagination, fantasy, dream, learning, listening, observation, and the universal bond among all living beings. It’s called being a writer.
Excellent!