Write what you know? No!

Writing advice often sucks. There, I said it. Not all of it, not always, but enough of it that I don’t feel even a little bad saying so. There are thousands of books, blogs, courses, and podcasts all claiming they can tell you exactly how to become a successful writer, and most of them recycle the same handful of phrases like sacred wisdom. Maybe the people giving the advice mean well. Maybe it even worked for them. But a lot of it survives not because it’s true, but because it’s easy to repeat.

If I had to choose one piece of writing advice to be permanently retired, it would be “write what you know.”

I understand why people cling to it. It sounds sensible. It sounds grounded. It sounds like the kind of thing a teacher would say to keep beginners from embarrassing themselves. But as actual advice for writing fiction, it’s lazy, limiting, and wildly misunderstood. Taken seriously (or worse, taken literally), it’s a great way to shrink your imagination down to the size of your own autobiography.

Creative writing isn’t about staying inside the borders of your personal experience. If it were, fiction would be unbearably small. Writing is about curiosity. It’s about imagining lives, worlds, situations, and moral corners you haven’t personally occupied. Yes, your background can inform your work. Of course it can. But that doesn’t mean your experience is the ceiling.

People love to point to writers whose careers seem to support the advice. Patricia Cornwell worked as a computer analyst in the Richmond Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. Dashiell Hammett was a Pinkerton detective. W.E.B. Griffin served in the U.S. Army and reached the rank of Staff Sergeant. And sure, those experiences gave them familiarity with certain worlds. But familiarity is not the same thing as total knowledge, and none of them were simply transcribing their day jobs into novels.

Cornwell never lived the life she gave her characters. Hammett didn’t personally encounter every crime, motivation, or psychological nuance he wrote about. Griffin wasn’t sitting in rooms with generals or embedded in the inner workings of every organization he portrayed. They filled in the gaps the same way all fiction writers do: with research, inference, and imagination. Their experience was a foothold, not a fence.

That’s where “write what you know” falls apart. It implies that legitimacy comes from personal experience rather than understanding. But writing doesn’t require you to have lived something; it requires you to have thought about it deeply enough to make it feel real.

Yes, you should know something about what you’re writing. You shouldn’t just wing it and hope confidence will carry you through. But knowing doesn’t mean having lived it. It means reading, studying, listening, asking questions, and caring enough to get it mostly right. If everyone only wrote what they personally knew, science fiction wouldn’t exist. Horror wouldn’t exist. Fantasy wouldn’t exist. Historical fiction wouldn’t exist. Most crime novels wouldn’t exist. The advice collapses under even mild scrutiny.

I suspect the advice exists because some writers go too far in the opposite direction. They write about things they don’t understand at all, do no homework, and the result is a mess. But that’s not a failure of imagination; it’s a failure of effort. Writing what you don’t know isn’t the problem. Refusing to learn is.

A better version of the advice, one that actually means something, would be “write what you can understand.” Not what you’ve lived. Not what you’ve personally endured. What you’re willing to take the time to learn well enough to make it convincing. Writing outside your experience forces you to educate yourself, and that’s not a bad thing. It’s how writers grow.

Ayn Rand didn’t have firsthand knowledge of running railroads or steel mills. She researched them and wrote them anyway. Love her work or hate it, readers believed the world she created because it held together. It felt intentional. It felt thought through.

And that’s all fiction really owes the reader. Not perfect realism. Not literal truth. Just enough internal logic and credibility to let the story breathe. You don’t have to be a cop to write a police procedural. You don’t have to be a scientist to write compelling science fiction. You just have to care enough to learn and imagine beyond yourself.

Curiosity matters more than biography. Empathy matters more than credentials. Imagination matters more than experience.

So write what you don’t know. Write it badly at first. Write it wrong. Write past the parts that don’t make sense yet. That’s what drafting is for. That’s what revision is for. Facts can be checked. Details can be fixed. But if you fence yourself in with bad advice, you never get far enough to fix anything.

Write first. Learn as you go. And don’t let a lazy phrase decide what you’re allowed to imagine.