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Titles referenced in this episode:

Ken Follet  https://ken-follett.com/books/

WMB Episode 43 with Antoine Bandele

The Martian by Andy Weir

Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer

Writing The Other Workshops and Resources

Episode Transcript:

Rekka (00:00):Welcome back to another episode of, we make books, a podcast about writing publishing and everything in between. I am Rekka. I write science fiction and fantasy as RJ Theodore.

Kaelyn (00:11):I'm Kaelyn. I am the acquisitions editor for Parvus Press. And today... So today we're talking about the phrase, "write what you know," and how I dislike it.

Rekka (00:22):Quite a bit. As it turns out.

Kaelyn (00:24):I feel like it can be, without context as Rekka points out in this, a little bit of a cop out. A little bit of a, like, I don't know what to do here. Well, write what you know. Um, as a writing exercise, I think that's fantastic. But as a problem solving technique, I think it's lacking. Now, granted, as we point out, Rekka and I are coming from a genre fiction background, so we don't actually know a ton about aliens yet; we're working on it. So, yeah, I, um, I don't know. I'm not a big fan of the phrase, but, uh, we, you know, get into all different aspects of this. And then we spend a lot of time talking about, okay, well, how do you write what you don't know? And how do you know what you don't know? And if you don't know what you don't know, what do you do about that?

Rekka (01:12):And do— and what if you don't know that you don't know anything, are you allowed to write?

Kaelyn (01:16):Certainly hasn't stopped people.

New Speaker (01:19):That's a, we didn't get into that. So, uh, here comes the music and we'll keep going on this. On the other side.

New Speaker (01:40):I'm running out of cappuccino.

Kaelyn (01:43):Sorry to hear that.

Rekka (01:44):I'm getting very low.

Kaelyn (01:45):So what happens when you've run out of cappuccino?

New Speaker (01:48):I switch to water.

Kaelyn (01:49):But how do you feel?

Rekka (01:52):Um, let me tell you about it... In prose form? Were you trying to make that a segue?

Kaelyn (02:00):Yes, I was.

Rekka (02:00):I was not on the, uh, the wavelength of how that was exactly going to transition.

Kaelyn (02:05):Well, that's because you're running out of cappuccino and you're caffeine deprived and your brain is not working at the, uh, super caffeinated level that you would like it to be.

Rekka (02:13):Gotcha.

Kaelyn (02:14):So if you were writing a character that was in desperate need of coffee...

Rekka (02:18):I would know exactly what to write.

Kaelyn (02:20):Yeah. So today, um, we're talking about the, uh, pervasive and very strange phrase, write what you know. And I say very strange, because everybody seems to have different opinions about what this means. And Rekka and I even have different opinions about what this means.

Rekka (02:38):Well, the people who've said it to me have had different opinions about what it means. Um, sometimes it's somebody saying literally dig into your own life, and that's the only place where your inspiration or subject matter can come from. That kind of precludes the entire genre of science fiction and fantasy.

Kaelyn (03:00):I don't like when people say that, because I think what ends up happening is you have a character or multiple characters that's experiences are limited to your own experiences. And I don't know about you, but I don't want to read a book that's just about me. I'm not interesting enough for that.

Rekka (03:18):Writers already have to struggle to vary their characters enough so that you can identify them by their dia