In this Issue:
Write What You Know
Writing from the wound
Know What You Write
Research
When to do your research
How much research to do
Write What You Know?
A piece of writing advice that’s often heard (so often in fact that it’s become a cliché) is ‘Write what you know.’
People interpret this differently. Some people take it to mean that, as writers of fiction, we should write only from our own experience. But this is, of course, extremely limiting. Taken to the extreme, this would mean only writing characters very similar, if not identical, to our own, and only including events we have personally experienced. My debut novel, Before I Go to Sleep, would therefore have had to be about a man in his late thirties who was working in an NHS hospital but dreaming of being a writer. Which, clearly, it is not.