Do You Need Personal Experience to Write About Something?

We writers like think of ourselves as metaphoric magicians—sitting at our desks, spinning worlds out of nothing but words and imagination. Pour a little research into the recipe, and our alchemy is complete. Yet an ongoing question among writers is the evergreen quandary about whether or not we must “write what we know.” In short, do you need personal experience to write about something?

In sorting through my email archives last week, I came upon an email I’d forgotten I’d saved, from a young writer asking this very question. He pointed to such classical giants as Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Orwell, who all experienced firsthand what they famously fictionalized—hefty topics such as war, migrant workers, and communism. The email asked, with plainspoken authenticity:

How does someone like me write something that has substance when I haven’t experienced much of the real world?

The standard answer to “must you write what you know?” is a qualified “no.” Sooner or later, we all must write what we don’t know. Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Orwell did it, and so must you and I. We are writing fiction after all. By definition, we’re making it up.

Depending on the story, we may end up writing about things we can’t experience. For instance, if you’re writing about a character who is dying, that isn’t something you can experience yourself and live to the tell the tale. For that matter, any time you write a character who is anything other than a carbon copy of your genetic and psychological makeup (so, pretty much every character you write), you’re going be writing something outside your experience—something you don’t know.

There is, however, another side to the argument. After all, could Hemingway, Steinbeck, Orwell, and so many others have written with such memorable power and authenticity with no personal experience to back them up? Of course we will never know. But I doubt it. We feel an undeniable edge—a truth—to stories that are written out of an author’s own lived experience.

As a young writer, I always squirmed under the harsh light of Henry David Thoreau’s declaration:

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

Mostly, I squirmed because I wasn’t yet ready to admit how sheltered and inexperienced I was, how little of the world I had seen, how much I had yet to learn. Stories were my window to the world; they were my experience. From that place of inexperience, I wrote stories I’m still proud of, but as I’ve gotten older, Thoreau’s words have come into focus for me. The stories I may write in the future have the potential to be so much more powerful than those I wrote when I was younger, thanks to the widening vista of life experiences.

In short, even though we can (and will) write stories based more on imagination and empathy than lived experience, this hardly negates the tremendous validity of, in fact, writing what we know. This doesn’t mean any one of us should discount the importance of whatever life experiences we’ve already lived or hold back on writing the stories that are ready to be written right now. What it does mean is that, particularly as writers, we should be willing to fling ourselves wide open to the banquet life sets before us.

Does this mean you have to go to war if you’re going to write about it? Visit every story setting in person? Test-drive all your characters’ bad habits? Exemplify all of their virtues?

Of course not. Especially if you write speculative fiction such as fantasy or sci-fi, that whole line of questioning grows quickly ridiculous.

What “write what you know” does mean, in my view, is that we need to cultivate awareness around whatever experiences we do have and to take them seriously in translating them into fiction that rings with authenticity.

4 Different Ways to Write What You Know

The advice to “write what you know” always seems to receive a fair amount of pushback. I think this is for the simple reason that its phrasing is too generic. What does it even mean? After all, I know all about Mary, Queen of Scots. That doesn’t mean I know her. I know lots of things about Hogwarts. Doesn’t mean I’ve been there.

These days so much of what we experience is vicarious, thanks to other people’s stories on the news, social media, and of course in books and movies. As a result, we can find a great deal of gray area between our “knowledge” of things and our “experience” of things. For instance, we can experience something viscerally by watching it in a movie or on the news (even to the point of traumatizing ourselves). However, even though this is a legitimate experience, it is not the same as a lived experience.

Both can be fodder for strong and authentic stories, but I believe it is important to recognize the different flavors brought to our stories through different varieties of experience. In mulling on this, I realized there are four possible ways to “know” something, each one aligning with a different intelligence center.

1. Write What You Experience (Embodied Knowledge)

One way or another, there is simply no substitute for our own lived experiences. My lived experience tells me this is so because we experience these real-life moments not just in our heads and our imaginations, but in our bodies. Empathically feeling someone else’s pain, fear, or joy is powerful, but it is rarely a full-body, full-sensory experience. However, what you experience in your own body, even if it as simple as licking salt off your fast-food fries, changes you. If what you’ve experienced is profound, it can alter the very way you look at life itself.

First-hand research of riding a horse or visiting the beach will provide you with the truth of the experience in ways you can’t access simply by observing or reading about the experience. Amp that up, and you realize that when you personally experience life-changing moments, you are the one who just lived through a story. Of course, that then has the potential to become a powerful force within your writing, even if you translate your experience into story events that are far removed from the trappings of your own life moment.

In short, don’t stint on life experiences. I realize this advice will be preaching to the choir for many. Some of you are out there having so much fun that your challenge is slowing down long enough to come in and write about it. However, many writers (*raises hand*) choose writing for the very reason that it seems to be a nice, quiet, introverted way to engage with the powerful moments in life. It lets us be astronomers instead of astronauts, to experience the vastness of space from a safe seat, complete with sun-proof goggles. If that sounds like you, then my words to you are: Don’t forget to go live your own stories to the best of your capabilities.

2. Write What You Feel (Emotional Knowledge)

Basically, the above point is all about not using the amazing capabilities of our imaginations as excuses for avoiding the first-hand experiences that will make us more powerful writers. It is not to say, however, that first-hand experience is the only way to write authentic stories. You don’t have to climb Mt. Everest to be able to write about powerful experiences. All you have to do is be willing to look deeply into your own interior.

Don’t think that’s copping out either. Spelunking into the depths of one’s own shadow can be every bit as daring as climbing to 30,000 feet. The trick is a) going there and b) being honest about what you experience. Then bring that back and use it to inform your fiction.

You don’t have to experience war in order to write authentically about fear. You don’t have to crash a plane in the wilderness to write about loneliness. And you don’t have to give birth to write about a parent’s love. But you do have to be willing to go into those places inside yourself that know fear, loneliness, love, joy, hate, ecstasy, bitterness, peace, etc. (And if you find you don’t really know any one of those feelings, then perhaps you’ve found a little bit of homework for point #1, above, or point #3, below.)

3. Write What You Dream (Intuitive Knowledge)

By “dream” here, I don’t just mean nighttime dreams, although of course they are always good fodder for fiction. What I’m talking about here is using the actual writing of your fiction as a sort of “dreaming out loud” to access your own inner truths and experiences. Basically, that is what written stories are—“out-loud dreams.” Particularly if you haven’t over-engineered a story with with your left brain, but just let it unfold (whether in an outline or in the first draft), what ends up between the covers of your book will be a deeply disguised but still startlingly accurate map of yourself.

In many ways, the very act of writing fiction is an exploration of knowing one’s self. By that logic, it is impossible for us to do anything other than “write what you know.” Mostly, we do this instinctively, and that’s enough, especially if we’re also engaging in the other practices in this article. But consciously examining our stories (in the same way we might try to interpret a dream) can help us better know ourselves and therefore what it is we’re really drawing on from our own experiences to create the various fantasies (and not just the genre) we’re choosing to put on the page, many of which are archetypal without our even realizing it.

4. Write What You Research (Head Knowledge)

Paradoxically, head knowledge can be both the strongest and the weakest of our intelligence centers. It is weak if we overvalue it at the expense of our own lived experiences. But it is undeniably powerful in granting us the ability to write with realism and verisimilitude about just about any topic that interests us.

With a little applied research or a little vicarious experience, we can bring verisimilitude to far-distant historical eras, to politics and power games happening behind closed doors, to fantastical creatures of nonexistent realities, to places in our own world we haven’t the time or money to visit, or to dangerous situations we aren’t trained to handle.

All the research in the world won’t substitute for emotional authenticity and honesty in your story’s scenes, but it can breathe stunning life into the details of those scenes. Dedicated head knowledge can help you fill in a myriad of gaps, while the lived experiences of your life unfold in their own good time.

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So do you need personal experience in order to write about something?

Yes, you do. You need every scrap of experience from every moment of your life.

But those experiences are are ever-growing. I would say to the young man who emailed me that the stories you write at eighteen are not the stories you will write at thirty-eight, and the stories you write at thirty-eight are not, I daresay, the stories you will write at sixty-eight or eighty-eight. But they are all valid.

A person who has not yet lived through certain life experiences will not write about those subjects in the same way as someone who has, but that doesn’t mean the stories shared by the less-experienced person are inherently less valuable. The value in either boils down to accuracy and authenticity. Write the stories you have to tell right now, and let life’s experiences teach you what you will write next.

Wordplayers, tell me your opinions! What do you think—do you need personal experience to write about something? Tell me in the comments!

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