Write What You Know, But Do You Know What to Write?

Join me for tomorrow night's Write With Me Club

Write what you know. It is a seemingly simple instruction and one of the very basics of anyone attempting to write a book. But sometimes it is difficult to decipher exactly what this instruction means.

Does it mean, for example, to write your life? Sometimes events that are in our recent history can feel too close to the bone, sometimes things that are buried in the past can feel like reliving trauma you have learnt to live with.

Most of us know falling in love, for example, but sometimes writing happy times can be even more difficult than writing the hard ones (as I discussed in this piece below about writing trauma).

Does this instruction mean that if you are a stamp collector you should be writing about stamps? Does this instruction mean that if you have never seen a ghost you should not be writing a haunting?

I remember when the idea for my novel, The Imposter, came to me. I was on a tube train, weeks away from starting a six-month write-your-novel course, and as the train rattled between stations, three characters came to me – a mother and father whose child had gone missing two decades before and were living in this no-man’s land of waiting for her return, and an archivist on a local newspaper who was determined to solve the case.

But I don’t read books that have plots like that, how on earth would I go about writing it? What I did know though were local newspapers, I had started my career on one at 18. And so I set off on my journey, one that would take me seven years from that trip on the tube to publication, and I would go down many tunnels with dead ends searching – grappling – for my twist, this ending that would make the whole story make complete sense.

At the time that I was doing this grappling, I was at the University of East Anglia doing my master’s degree in creative writing, and the first book that I had written with Wendy Mitchell, Somebody I Used to Know, spent four (or was it five?) weeks in the Sunday Times Bestsellers.

Each week I went into workshop, still struggling with this twist I was looking for while my fellow students congratulated me on our book’s success. And then something inspired me – of course, the book that was currently a bestseller! Why hadn’t I thought of this before? I knew about Alzheimer’s disease, I knew about dementia. Not first hand, but well enough to write a book that was now one of the best selling in the country.

I realised in that moment that this lesson of writing what you know could be applied in many varied ways, and that insight unlocked for me something of the final twist – one final character to add to my cast who would change everything.

And so, I thought tomorrow night (Monday October 7th) when we meet for our monthly Write With Me Club, we could dig a little deeper into this idea of writing what you know.

A reminder to new subscribers to White Ink that we meet on the first Monday of every month at 7pm (currently BST). I know this makes it so hard (almost impossible) for Australian and New Zealand followers and you are missed – if in the future there are enough of you I will do another time to suit you too.

The workshop is one hour long, on zoom, where most importantly we get a chance to say hello and catch up, and then we focus on one particular theme for the session and explore it a little more with examples and exercises.

You do need to be a paid member to join, but what is a few pounds/dollars/euros in exchange for a whole creative writing class, or just an hour with a bunch of like-minded creative people from the comfort of your home?

I send out the zoom invite tomorrow at midday, so you’ll need to have upgraded by then to receive it.

I would love to see you there tomorrow to discuss more on this topic of writing what you know, and so, if you would like to join us, click on the subscribe button below and upgrade today:

And if you haven’t upgraded yet but are tempted, have a look at this post to see what else White Ink has to offer you. I hope to see you there.