March 9, 2026
If you’ve been writing for any length of time, you’ve heard “Write what you know.” In fact, you might’ve been inculcated with it, which is the ten-dollar way of saying, “had it knocked into your head.” Often attributed to Mark Twain, the phrase has been repeated countless times in various forms by authors, editors, and by other artists too. The legendary jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker put it this way: “If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.”
The consensus today is that the rule is misunderstood and too broad, if not flat-out wrong. Brokeback Mountain author Annie Proulx once said, “What I find to be very bad advice is the snappy little sentence, ‘Write what you know’…If we write simply about what we know we never grow…What one should write about is what interests one.” Stephen King said, “It’s bad advice if you take it as an unbreakable rule, but good advice if you use it as a foundation.”
Even as writers walk back from the phrase, it seems to have acquired a corollary: “Write who you are.” A literary agent recently told me that her daughter and some other young women are “militantly” opposed to men writing female protagonists. Well, for better or worse, I’ve done that in the alt-historical novel I’m pitching and in several short pieces. These include An Uncloudy Day, newly published by The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature (whose motto is, “No good Southern writing is complete without a dead mule”).
I took this creative leap because it was crucial to the story. I also blended it with lived experience from the time when, like the main character, my wife and I owned a Florida beach home that was sometimes threatened by hurricanes. Here’s the elderly narrator remembering storms she’s been through.
“[Hurricane] Philip blew our shingles halfway to I-10 and Rachel, damn her soul, made me cry when she knocked down the tall sand pine shading the yard. (We had a sand pine that we loved). But the house Dad built, on land the government gave him in gratitude for flying bombers over Germany, always held up. (Our neighborhood was full of these houses).
“The waves aren’t blue-green and gentle anymore. Out the window I see dark, heavy swells that’ve swallowed part of the dune and our walkover with it. The warning flags are flapping madly under a raging sky. My street is underwater from the rain and it’s coming down harder by the minute.” (This didn’t happen to us but is based on real life.)
My novel, whose protagonist is a woman astronaut at the dawn of the space race, is an example of Proulx’s advice about interest. I’ve been following space flight since I was a kid and vividly recall the early launches that led to the moon landing in 1969.
While writing the book, I stuffed my brain with every bit of info I could find about those missions and the pioneer female aviators who, in an alternate timeline, might have been called on to fly them. So even though I’ve never seen Earth from a hundred miles high, I believe I saw a good story. I hope you’ll be able to read it soon; meanwhile you can find all my short fiction here.