I've always thought there was something to that statement, but also that it should be taken with a pinch of salt.
Arguing in favour of that statement, a lot of my writing features Birmingham, England, which is the city I grew up in. I didn't want to set my stories in more well-known places like London or New York, for several reasons:
- I don't know those places. Using locations that you're not familiar with can lead to silly mistakes, which I have encountered reading books like High Society by Ben Elton. That book features a passage where a character--a rock star--who is running late for a gig, jogs from the City centre to the concert venue. In the real Birmingham, the venue named is about fifteen miles from the city centre, but the narrative claimed that he completed the run in thirty minutes,
- I feel no affinity for those places. I wanted to be able to convey some warmth about the locations in my story,
- If I stick to places I know, I can easily drop in landmarks that I'm personally familiar with, alongside amusing local names (for example, the local name for a prominent statue of a woman reclining in a fountain is 'The floozy in the jacuzzi').
- I wanted to avoid the old clichés that are seen in movies all the time. You can pretty much guarantee that if an American movie has a segment based in London, that it will open with a panoramic shot showing the Thames and Big Ben, or a close-up shot of someone getting out of a black cab with a red phone box in the background. I didn't ant to find myself resorting to that hackneyed (no pun intended) imagery in my own work.
In puppet | STRINGS, our hero, Brad Kimball, has a series of odd dreams. One of those dreams details what tinnitus (ringing in the ears) is like for full-blown sufferers. Alas, I am one such person.
So, in those contexts, 'Write what you know' is front-and-centre with my writing.
Having said all that, and possibly arguing against that sage advice, I always wonder if it's limiting to stick rigidly to that rule. If you only write what you know, does it put a fence around the stories you can create? One could argue that entire genres like Fantasy or Science-Fiction wouldn't even exist if people were only able to write what they know.
I think there has to be a degree of speculation in fiction. Not necessarily 'what will the future be like?', but 'what would the world be like if this thing worked a different way?
