Write What You Know?

The age-old advice given to aspiring authors is to “write what you know.” And I tend to think that’s fairly reasonable advice…to a point. Because as a reader, well, I don’t want to think that everything I’m reading is semi-autobiographical. And if you only write what you know, that’s what your books are going to be.

I just finished a book written by someone whose blog I’ve read for years. And knowing a few things here and there about this person’s personal life and the troubles and victories they’ve experienced actually made the book harder to read and, well, a tad boring. Because this person wrote what they knew. And so while it was a somewhat speculative-fiction/sci-fi novel, there were enough pieces of the plot that were “Oh, now we’re pulling in the experience of x that was blogged about at such and such a time” that it broke my ability to stay immersed in the novel. Now, obviously, people who don’t know the person (even in the only semi-knowing way that I do as a blog reader) probably won’t have that problem. But it got me thinking.

In some ways, I do write what I know. But I hope that it’s not in a way that people who know me will say, “Oh, that’s when Elizabeth had such and such happen.” Of course, some of that I avoid because I write about experiences I’ve witnessed rather than participated in. I’m not, personally, post-abortive. I haven’t placed a child for adoption. Though I have dated non-believers, though never seriously. But I’ve been involved in ministry to women who have had abortions or placed children for adoption (and my own boys were adopted.) So there are probably pieces of me in my books. I hope they’re not overly distracting.

More than that, though, my next series will be fairly personal. June and July (pronounced Julie) are twin sisters experiencing the highs and lows of trying to start a family. And they’ll go through some of the same dark places I experienced. They’ll also go through some places I never walked – but I have friends or family who walked through. In a lot of ways, writing the first of this series has been hard – reliving some of those memories and mining them for details that make what I hope will be a compelling story that’s got some universal appeal.