why 'write what you know' can be very bad advice

Write what you know.

This has always been problematic advice for me. I started writing fiction when I was very young – I wrote my first novel when I was 14 and it almost, almost, got published several years later – and I could sense from my obsessive reading that writers were supposed to know a lot more than I did.

I was a sheltered, smalltown girl, and the only thing I thought I knew was that I didn't even know what I didn't know.

I embarked on a quest to become Worldly and Experienced…at...