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necessarian) wrote2018-01-01 06:46 pm
necessarian) wrote2018-01-01 06:46 pm
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[Archiving] Write What You Know
Originally posted: 31.8.'15
In my last writing advice post, Liberation from the List, I briefly mentioned the concept of writing based on your character’s perspective, which is at the core of my ethos as a writer. I’d like to elaborate on that further one day in a post about about third person indirect, but first, I’d like to touch on the phrase I used in Liberation from the List–“write what they know.” I used this in reference to projecting a character’s emotions and experiences onto a given situation, but a more common phrase you’ll see is “write what you know,” which are four words I live by. A lot of people have a lot of problems with this, and they justify it that if you only write based on your experiences, you’re limiting yourself a lot and neglecting a great deal of fantastical possibility. But I’d like to offer you an alternative interpretation of this phrase, and once again, it comes down to emotional authenticity.
When I think “write what you know,” I don’t think of writing stories about my life. If all my stories were about uni students panicking as assignment deadlines draw near, I’d be a very unpopular writer indeed. But if I took that emotion of last-minute stress, slowly creeping panic, the feeling of utter uselessness in the face of something that, at the time, seems insurmountable, but will look much less daunting in hindsight–well, that’s an emotion that can be applied to a lot of situations, in any setting, any context. When I advise people to write what they know, I’m talking about emotion, action, and reaction, and putting your own emotional experiences into your characters’ lives.
This extends to character creation too. When you create a character, a good idea is to put something of yourself in them. It can even be something as tiny as rubbing the back of your head when you’re confused, or your mouth going dry when you’re nervous. So long as there’s some way you can relate to your character, you can work with that, and extrapolate from your baseline to other traits. Again, the neighbour emotions concept that I covered in Liberation from the List comes into play.
For fanfiction writers, this can be a little different, but it comes down to the same thing–for your POV character, and even for side characters, find some level on which you relate to them. I can guarantee that this makes everything so much easier. I like to put different aspects of my personality into different characters, so I can compartmentalise their emotions and reactions and not get confused. If you really can’t find anything in common with a character, the next step is to look to your friends, your family, other people in your life. Writing what you know is about being able to project the emotions and personalities around you onto your writing. Of course, you know yourself best, which is why I first suggested using your own emotional experiences, but using other people you know is not a bad substitute at all.
And one final point–it’s important to remember that characterisation is not a checklist. It’s a pretty good idea for an initial sketch to keep bullet points of your characters’ good traits and bad traits, likes and dislikes, but in the end this is all just subjective, and when you come to actually writing these characters, it’s more important to look at how your characters interact with their context, and not to be afraid of things changing! Sometimes your character will be nothing like their initial sketch, and that’s fine. So long as what they do makes sense–and if you write what you know, write scenarios that make sense to you and character reactions that fit with your own mindset, then your characters will resonate with your readers way more than if they just stayed as a list of traits for their whole life. Don’t be afraid to write what you know! It’s not limiting, and it’s not the outdated advice that other writing advice people sometimes make it out to be. Rather, like everything else with writing, what matters is what it means to you, what you make it mean, so give your characters some personal meaning and you’ll be able to see them grow, take on more facets, develop into the sort of characters that make for great reading.
When I think “write what you know,” I don’t think of writing stories about my life. If all my stories were about uni students panicking as assignment deadlines draw near, I’d be a very unpopular writer indeed. But if I took that emotion of last-minute stress, slowly creeping panic, the feeling of utter uselessness in the face of something that, at the time, seems insurmountable, but will look much less daunting in hindsight–well, that’s an emotion that can be applied to a lot of situations, in any setting, any context. When I advise people to write what they know, I’m talking about emotion, action, and reaction, and putting your own emotional experiences into your characters’ lives.
This extends to character creation too. When you create a character, a good idea is to put something of yourself in them. It can even be something as tiny as rubbing the back of your head when you’re confused, or your mouth going dry when you’re nervous. So long as there’s some way you can relate to your character, you can work with that, and extrapolate from your baseline to other traits. Again, the neighbour emotions concept that I covered in Liberation from the List comes into play.
For fanfiction writers, this can be a little different, but it comes down to the same thing–for your POV character, and even for side characters, find some level on which you relate to them. I can guarantee that this makes everything so much easier. I like to put different aspects of my personality into different characters, so I can compartmentalise their emotions and reactions and not get confused. If you really can’t find anything in common with a character, the next step is to look to your friends, your family, other people in your life. Writing what you know is about being able to project the emotions and personalities around you onto your writing. Of course, you know yourself best, which is why I first suggested using your own emotional experiences, but using other people you know is not a bad substitute at all.
And one final point–it’s important to remember that characterisation is not a checklist. It’s a pretty good idea for an initial sketch to keep bullet points of your characters’ good traits and bad traits, likes and dislikes, but in the end this is all just subjective, and when you come to actually writing these characters, it’s more important to look at how your characters interact with their context, and not to be afraid of things changing! Sometimes your character will be nothing like their initial sketch, and that’s fine. So long as what they do makes sense–and if you write what you know, write scenarios that make sense to you and character reactions that fit with your own mindset, then your characters will resonate with your readers way more than if they just stayed as a list of traits for their whole life. Don’t be afraid to write what you know! It’s not limiting, and it’s not the outdated advice that other writing advice people sometimes make it out to be. Rather, like everything else with writing, what matters is what it means to you, what you make it mean, so give your characters some personal meaning and you’ll be able to see them grow, take on more facets, develop into the sort of characters that make for great reading.