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The whole 'write what you know' advice is getting twisted into something boring.
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wesley_adams17d ago
Hold on, doesn't that advice also kill curiosity? If we only wrote what we already know, why would we ever research or imagine anything new? It feels like people hear "write what you know" and stop there. They forget the second part is to learn what you don't know so you can write about that, too. The point was never to just describe your own boring life. It was to use your real feelings to make the fake stuff feel true.
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rowan65817d ago
Exactly, like @wesley_adams said, it's about using your real feelings as the anchor. You can write about dragons or space battles, but the fear your character feels has to come from a time you were truly scared, like being lost as a kid. That's the "know" part. The rest is just building a cool new cage for that real emotion.
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craig.mila17d ago
That whole "real feelings" thing is just an excuse for lazy writing. People use it to justify slapping their boring therapy journal onto a spaceship and calling it a story. The actual craft is in building a world that feels real, not in mining your childhood for every emotion. Research and imagination built Tolkien's world, not him remembering how sad he felt when he lost a toy. Sometimes a dragon is just a dragon, and that's fine.
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