If you have ever heard the advice to "write what you know about," you should listen to it. It is one of the keys to making your fiction truthful and alive.
The trouble is, many novel writing beginners take this advice and write pure autobiography. Taking the hard facts of your life and calling them a novel doesn't work. What does work is to draw on the experiences of your life, but not in a literal way.
Below are three ways to "write what you know" without resorting to barely-concealed autobiographical fiction.
We all have specialized knowledge of something, often many things...
Whatever subject you are knowledgeable about, don't be afraid to incorporate it into your novel. It is one of the best ways there is to write what you know about, because it will give your novel authority.
Oh, and never make the mistake of believing that your specialized knowledge, whatever it may be, is too dull for a novel.
Orchid growing might seem humdrum and ordinary to you if you have been doing it all your life, but it will be fascinating to those of us who know nothing about it.
Hands up anyone who has never had a romantic relationship turn sour. Not many, I bet. It is a common experience: falling in love and then losing that love.
Now, as I have already explained, it is not a good idea to write a novel about that relationship and simply change the names.
Writing purely autobiographical fiction is not a good idea artistically, and it isn't a good idea morally - because people's real feelings are on the line. (Even if you change the names, they will still know who they are.)
So, using this failed romance, how do you draw on your experiences without writing an autobiography?
The doomed relationship will be composed of countless fragments, and it is perfectly acceptable to use these in your fiction...
Think of these fragments like tiny tiles in a huge mosaic, with the mosaic being your novel.
The way you construct the mosaic is by using some tiles created in your imagination and some tiles borrowed from a countless number of real-life experiences.
Anyone who knows you might be able to recognize a fragment here and there, but the fictional stories you create will still be exactly that: fictional.
Back to that failed romantic relationship...
We know that writing about the events in a literal way won't work, but that borrowing tiny fragments from the story here and there and working them into your fiction is okay.
What is also okay - indeed, what is essential - is this...
Making use of the emotions that the real-life story caused you to feel.
We all know what it feels like when a relationship ends. The emotion experienced is usually one of pain - though it can sometimes be relief (!)
The precise way in which we experience this emotion will be different for all of us, meaning that if your novel is to truly show the reader what the world looks like through your eyes, you need to get down on paper precisely how a relationship ending feels to you.
The relationship you create in your novel will not constitute autobiographical fiction (barring the odd borrowed fragment here and there), but the emotions underpinning the imagined events will be very real.
Another way to make use of your real-life emotional experiences is to use them to help you imagine how experiences you have never had might feel.
For example...
I might not know what X feels like. But I do know what Y feels like. And remembering Y will help me to better imagine X.
Writing autobiographical fiction might be tempting at first glance, but you are going to have the devil's own job trying to craft a story out of events which don't want to follow the principles of storytelling.
Much better merely to borrow from your life - a fragment of an experience here, an emotional truth there.
That way, you can write what you know about while keeping the story you tell essentially fictional.
But where does all the made-up material come from?
If writing about what you know means drawing from your life, but making up the bulk of the material in the novel, where will all your ideas come from?
The answer, of course, is the imagination. And in the full-length version of this article (available in the Ultimate Writing Guide) you will find a detailed discussion of how to make best use of this most valuable of writer's tools.