Write what you (don't) know by Eric Beetner

 CRAFT What are your thoughts on writing ‘outside your own experience’? What are the potential pitfalls? What are the reasons to do it? Can you give a personal example of how you navigated this potentially problematic terrain?

I’ve long been a critic of “write what you know” as writing advice. I’m a fan of write what you want to know.

Of course you will bring a unique, lived-in reality to your writing if you write from your own experience, but I also think personal experience can lie below any story you write. If you create real people doing real things, then you can add the details and observations from your own life to fully round out a story.

I’ve certainly used verbal tics and personality traits from people I know in my real life. I use my own opinions and moral views to build my characters. I also like to write people who are far away from my own experience. 

Let’s face it, I write crime novels but I have lived a crime-free life. I’ve never even been drunk or taken drugs. Never been arrested. That doesn’t mean I can’t write about those things. Writing outside my own experience is the most entertaining part of the writing process for me.

My for novel There and Back, I had a group of junior executives at a tech company get stranded in the woods after a bonding retreat went wrong. I started doing research on survival techniques and bushcraft so I could learn how to keep them alive out in the wilderness. But I quickly realized that my characters would not have the knowledge I was learning, so I stopped. Instead, I asked myself “what would I do in that situation”? I may not have had the right answer, but neither would the characters. I used my lack of experience as a way to reflect the truth of what the characters were experiencing.

I’ve also written first-person female. I live with three women, have three sisters and have worked with women my whole life. I like to think I learned a little bit about them enough to be able to write them as three-dimensional people. I also knew well enough to hedge my bets and give my female lead in Two In The Head, for example, an upbringing where her father treated her as a son he always wanted. I intentionally masculinized her a little bit so I would have an excuse for when I inevitably got accused of getting it wrong about the female mind. (which hasn’t happened so far, I’m happy to say)

But writing from her perspective was a really fun exercise. An unpublished novel of mine, written in first-person female, is, I think, my best work. I guess I’ll see if I can ever sell it.

To write is to explore and I just feel that exploring destinations you’ve visited before isn’t as interesting as new territory. Inevitably your own experience will creep in. It will be there to solve the difficult problems with a plot or a character. Use that. But with each book, I want to learn something new. About myself, my characters, the world around me.