Author Questions: What’s the Worst Writing Advice You’ve Ever Heard?

This is an ongoing series of “questions every author avoids answering” (based on this video by Dale L. Roberts) and my answers to them. I recommend every author ask themselves these same questions to better understand themselves and their art.

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Question:

What’s the worst writing advice you’ve ever heard?

 

The quick answer:

"Only write what you know."

 

The long answer:

This is actually a common bit of advice you’ll hear as a writer, often delivered with an air of pomposity, and I couldn’t disagree more.

At the heart of the statement is the idea that authors put a part of themselves into their writing, whether they mean to or not, and if you want to come off as genuine, you should avoid putting in your story/book/essay anything that would seem beyond your own experience. Makes sense, right?

Not at all.

Maybe this is true for memoir/autobiography writers. After all, you wouldn’t want to lie about your own experience and sell it as authentic (like this author did). And if you’re writing other non-fiction, then, yeah, you need to do your research and make it accurate. You wouldn’t want to lie about your sources or make up facts (as this author did).

But if you’re writing fiction, “only write what you know” is the worst advice. The entire POINT of fiction is to escape reality and see things from alternative points of view. The two point of view characters in my first fantasy book, Dragon of the Federation, are an elderly dragon and a young female mage. What do I know about being elderly, much less an elderly dragon? I’m also male. What do I really know about the experiences of any females? Or, for that matter, elves, demons, evil generals, ghosts, space nuns, space opera heroes, or all the other weird POVs I’ve written over the years. If I took that bit of bad advice, I wouldn’t have even started those stories.

Dragon of the Federation was released in 2021, and so far no one has come to me to tell me that I got it wrong. Nor for any of my other stories or books.

When I point this out to those who give this advice, they tend to stutter and backtrack and justify their statement by saying that I must be very imaginative to think of life as a dragon, and that my observations of the female condition must be very good. Maybe that’s true. And to be fair, I’ve tried to have “sensitivity readers” read my work who are more like the lead characters (when possible. There aren’t exactly real dragons flying around).

But we can’t go around stifling creativity.

So consider this your official approval to write whatever you want, no matter how outside your experience it is. Feel free to explore and create. And if someone tells you it isn’t accurate, ask them how, then go back and revise, but don’t give it up.

 

Cheers and happy reading!