Writing Who You Know

Lit World Interviews

A popular piece of writing advice is to write about what you know. Taken literally, if we only wrote about exactly what we personally have knowledge of or experience with, we probably wouldn’t be able to write the stories that we do. The same applies to who you know. Most of us aren’t on speaking terms with murderers, ghosts, aliens, mini purple spotted giraffes, or any of the other people and creatures that find their ways into our worlds. This is good really, because if some of them really were in our lives we probably wouldn’t be very comfortable, and could possibly be institutionalized for sharing the fact that certain others of them were.  Hey there purple spotted guy.

We writers have to get to know our characters intimately if we want them to come alive in our stories, because readers can tell when we don’t. Off the top of…

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