Write what you know....maybe and maybe not

When I was a teenager back in the 1970s, I remember my creative writing teacher always saying that we young writers should write what we know.

For me there were two problems with that instruction:

1.  I didn't really feel I knew anything.  I grew up quite sheltered on a military base where I lived for 17 years (we weren't the ones who got transferred every few years).  I just didn't feel my life experiences were worth writing about and that anything I did know was boring and inconsequential.

2.  The life experiences I did have were ones I didn't wish to expose on paper. Even today I don't generally touch those years with a proverbial 10-foot pole. Those years stay in a vault that does not get opened.

So that left me no choice except to write about the things that interested me.  This included certain time periods, historical figures and somewhat gothic romances.  I only wrote drama, and I remember one classmate having the upstart audacity to admonish that I shouldn't write drama because what did I know about it?  Oh, little did he know.  Please refer again to bullet point #2.  I couldn't write about my personal drama, but I could infuse it into my characters.  I wasn't very good at doing it in my teen years, but I am confident with my abilities in that regard now.  I can not only bring my readers to tears, I can even bring myself to tears.  When I wrote the death of one of my characters from a novel I wrote 10 years ago, I wept for an entire weekend.  I mourned his loss.  When I lost my beloved grandfather in 1973, one of my teachers had said, "Don't cry.  He wouldn't want you to cry."  I was denied the mourning process, but I was able to live it over three decades later through my writing.  Recently I wrote a short story that touched that vaulted door of those childhood years, and I made myself cry.  At least one reader cried too.

These days I continue to write subjects that interest me, and if I don't know something needed for the story, I research it.  That is perhaps were the early writing teacher failed me: that she should have said to write what I want to write about but just make sure it is thoroughly researched.  That is not to say that you vomit back the plethora of data you have gathered but that you know your subject well enough to write it with authority, as if you had lived it, as if you had been there.  At that point your imagination is free to take your characters where they need to go.