Write what you know.
It’s one of those bits of advice that sounds so simple—so obvious—that we barely think to question it. You’ll hear it in writing workshops, passed around in Discord servers, from well-meaning friends and burnt-out authors alike.
And at first glance, it makes sense.
Write what you know. Write from experience. Stick to your lane.
After all, lived experience can add a kind of honesty to your writing.
You know what your childhood bedroom smelled like after a thunderstorm.
You know the sound of a slammed door when the fight turns real.
You know grief, even if you don’t know war.
Love, even if you’ve never crossed a galaxy to find it.
That knowing gives your work gravity. It adds texture.
But here’s where it falls apart:
Taken literally, “write what you know” becomes a limitation—not a liberation.
When Taken Too Literally, It Becomes a Cage
If you follow it strictly, you can only write versions of yourself.
You can’t write someone from a different time, culture, body, or mindset.
You can’t write about magic, or war, or betrayal—unless you’ve been there.
You can’t write the broken, the strange, the unreal.
You can’t write fiction.
And so, writers stop. Or they shrink their stories into safe little boxes. Or they feel unqualified to tell the stories they wantto tell, and they put the pen down altogether.
That’s the real damage of this advice.
Where It Does Help
Let’s not throw it out entirely. There’s truth in it—just not the kind it’s usually sold as.
Writing from lived experience can give your prose sharpness.
That small, observational detail. That emotional truth that lands just right.
That turn of phrase that tells the reader, “Yes, this is real.”
It’s great if you’ve been through something your character is facing. It can make the moment ring true. It might even be the thing that anchors the entire book.
But it’s one tool.
It’s not a requirement.
You don’t need to suffer to write about suffering.
You don’t need to commit murder to understand guilt.
What “Knowing” Actually Means
It doesn’t mean you’ve done the exact thing you’re writing about.
It means you understand something real at the heart of it.
You might not have fought a dragon, but you know what fear in the face of something vastly more powerful than you feels like.
You also know that regret can mingle with victory—that sometimes a win isn’t worth what it cost you.
You might not have survived a shipwreck, but you know what it’s like to feel alone, or overwhelmed, or desperate to stay afloat in your own life.
“Knowing,” in this context, is about emotional truth.
It’s about being curious enough to learn—to research, to empathise, to imagine deeply and responsibly.
And that learning?
It doesn’t have to come from real-life experience alone.
We learn through the media we consume—books, films, songs, documentaries, long-form essays.
Stories told by others become part of what we “know,” even if that knowledge comes to us through the pen of another person.
No, it’s not the same as living it, but it still adds texture, insight, perspective.
We can also read about what we can’t experience ourselves. And sometimes, that’s the only option.
You probably aren’t going to live through a civil war. Or a decades-long deep space mission.
But you can research. You can listen. You can learn enough to write with empathy and intent.
Writing Requires Curiosity, Not Permission
I’ve spent a lot of years training as a martial artist, and outside of that training, I’ve been involved in fights where there was a real risk of harm.
Maybe that adds a certain verisimilitude to the fight scenes I write—and that’s great. It’s a useful tool for me, and I use it, but a writer shouldn’t be expected to undergo years of arduous training just to write a good fight scene.
I’ve never flown a plane, but I’ve read books written by pilots.
I’ve never killed anyone, but I can put myself into the mindset of someone who has.
I can lean into the fear, the regret, the anger, the sadness—whatever emotions that killing causes in my characters—and I can use what I know to write what I don’t.
That’s the job.
Writing is an act of imaginative empathy.
You reach out. You reach in.
You take what you do know, and you use it to access what you don’t.
So Write What You Know. And Know More.
Let it be a starting point, not a cage.
Write what you’ve lived. Write what you’ve felt. Write what you’ve learned.
Then push beyond it.
Write what you want to understand.
Write what scares you.
Write what you’d never dare to say aloud in a room full of people.
You don’t need to be a veteran to write a war story.
You don’t need to be heartbroken to write a romance.
You don’t need to live it to tell it well.
You just need to care enough to write with intent.
To imagine with clarity.
To tell the truth—even in fiction.