Someone once told me to branch away from what I knew to write about. Actually, it was just about every writing professor or teacher I’ve ever had. They always tell us to learn something new or become an expert on something we didn’t have much knowledge on earlier. They tell us not to write what we know because, well, we know it. And it makes sense, because in order to write, we must learn new things – we can’t always write about the same shit. But my best writing comes from my heart. It comes from deep within myself and my experiences. It’s real. So that’s what I do. I write what I know.
And what they never tell you is that the reason we don’t write what we know is because we have to learn more to write what we know about it. That homeless man on the street is a living, breathing story. No one has written about him because no one knows about him. So we conduct interviews and sit on the corner with him and talk about his wife that passed away while he was at war and how he came home and had a mental breakdown and has been on the corner of the street ever since. Then, we know. We know everything there is to know about him, so then we write. We now have learned and can write what we know. That’s some reverse psychology bullshit. But it works and it’s amazing.
I write because it’s what I know. I’ll say it again for the people it in the back. I write because it’s what I know. Growing up, most people were insanely talented at naming every part of a cell or solving physics problems or listing every event that happened during the Cold War. Meanwhile, I was off in my little corner writing away, scribbling in my journal or typing on my computer about anything. I wrote and I wrote, time and time again. I couldn’t stop. I had so many feelings and I just had to get them out.
They teach us how to write letters and make sentences, but creating a story is all up to us. If we mess the whole thing up, it’s just something for us to learn from. They teach us how to conduct interviews and take shorthanded notes and ensure that our dialogue is true and the story is true, but writing that story takes us taking risks and simply doing. We writers love to just do. Nike should sponsor us.
They’ll tell you over and over to appreciate what you know, but to branch out and write something new, write about something new. And you can do it, but in the end you’ll be wishing that you wrote about something you knew about. That way it has more heart, more empathy, more connection to you. But that’s just a part of it. You have to take it and run.
