Think back on your life. Go ahead, I’ll wait. First loose tooth, first day of school, first kiss… done? Welcome back. Now what do you think about the ubiquitous writing advice “write what you know”? I’ve been poking around the internet for a while now and this one is a popular adage for writers to refute.

“That’s ridiculous! Where’s the fun in that?”

“I’m so boring, how can I just write what’s happened to me? Isn’t that an autobiography?”

“Tolkien never met a hobbit, why can he get away with it?”

Aside from the horror stories of creative writing teachers reading this rule as strictly literal (seriously, someone’s teacher only allowed the class to write what they had personal experience with), I shake my head at these writers and editors for their lack of imagination. Writing what you know is not a literal prescription for how to write. It’s a shortcut to finding your passion project.

The ideas that call to me are the ideas that I have some experience with–ideas that I “know”. That “knowing” is what gets me so excited about them. Even though writing is hard and life gets in the way, I need to return to these ideas and express them. They needle at me until writing is the only salve. The need spreads and eventually works its way into my writing.

In my high school drama class, there was a quote from Johnny Depp on the wall.

“With any part you play, there is a certain amount of yourself in it. There has to be, otherwise it’s just not acting. It’s lying.”

I loathed this quote. The words bothered me. “I want to use my imagination and get outside of myself”, I thought. “I’m not lying when I act!” But over the years I’ve thought more about it. I finally figured out what Mr. Depp meant. Actors need to have an emotional core for a character or the performance will ring hollow. It will be a lie to the audience. It doesn’t have to be a big piece, just enough for you to build from.

Writers, likewise, ought to find an emotional core in their work. If your character does not act like an actual person, you aren’t writing what you know. Writers do meet people between their coffee-fueled writing binges, they know how people behave. If you’re not inspired by your project, you’re not writing what you know. And what a sad state to be in! I can’t imagine writing something only because it was marketable and I couldn’t care less for it. If a writer forces any facet of their work by not writing what they know, the reader will notice and disengage–hobbits or no.

Of course, no one ever truly “knows”. Not really. This is why we research, learn, and enhance our understanding. We read and we write and we talk to as many people as we can. Writing what you know, in this way, is only as useful as you make it. You could hear “write what you know” and start keeping an immaculate diary or you could think about the human experience, how you fit into it, and how your characters fit into it. What do you have in common? What is different? What makes this story different from your own? Is the situation similar to someone else’s that you have heard of? How can you change it to make it unique and interesting for your reader? Does it feel real to you? Does it spark passion that echos in your work?

And I bet if you thought about your favorite projects, you would find part of yourself in it–something that you “know”. You may find out you “know” a lot more than you thought you did.