Write What You Know? But Top Writers Don’t

The oldest bit of advice in the writing universe is: write about what you know. What would have happened to J.K. Rowling if she had followed it, I wonder. Maybe she’d be peddling remaindered copies of ‘How to be a Writer as a Single Mother on State Support’. Instead, she wrote about something no-one knew about, including herself: a school for magicians. Did she actually go to one? Her sales figures soar above Bill Gates’. No, she just made one up.

The wondrous American short story writer, Flannery O’Conner, said she wrote to find out what she knew. Makes sense to me, who seems to know less and less the older I get. If I have to write about what I know, it would be a self-help book entitled, ‘How To Fail To Give Up Smoking’.

If Kakfa had had to write what he knew, he’d have had to get a Rowlins magician to turn him into a cockroach before he showed us how a cockroach feels as it tries to turn over. Shakespeare would have needed a sex-change operation and a slew of murder victims so we could meet Lady Macbeth; Leonard Nimoy might have got stuck in a literary worm-hole and we would have forever lost his immortal words. Beam me up, Scotty.