What Happens Next: A Gallimaufry

melancholic romantic comic cynic. bi & genderqueer. fantasy writer. sysrae on ao3.

Bad books on writing tell you to β€˜WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW’, a solemn and totally false adage that is the reason there exist so many mediocre novels about English professors contemplating adultery.

Joe Haldeman (via maxkirin)

Just choked on my fucking drink

(via thingsididntknowwereerotic)

I know nothing.

(via ktempest)

people so consistently interpret ‘write what you know’ to mean ‘write about your own life’ that the phrase is kind of useless as advice i guess. but if you interpret it to mean ‘write based on your own observations’, it becomes good advice. write personalities as you observe them in the people around you. write the speech patterns you hear. write the colors and textures and weather and feelings you experience.

but don’t PLOT what you know, because your life would probably not make a very good book.

(via laleiragoblin)

Look at how Neil Gaiman starts a book - ordinary, everyday, apparently write-what-you-know; it’s especially noticeable in Neverwhere and The Ocean at the End of the Lane if you grew up in Britain or Ireland. Then, just when you’re at ease, that comfy sweater you’re wrapped in starts to unravel in strange ways. Look at Charles Stross’s Laundry series: the atmosphere of tea or coffee, memos and forms in triplicate is all too familiar before the black-humour Elder Horrors emerge from the filing cabinets. (File under H for Horrors, please, not E for Elder.) It’s less a matter of “write what you know” as “make use of what you know” then twist it out of true.

(via petermorwood)

or, as I tell my students, “write what you know” doesn’t mean write narrowly, it means learn broadly. Shove your brain full of things on a daily basis, so when you need them, they’ve had time to meld with everything else, and make what you write your own.

(via suricattus)

(via marthawells-deactivated20181223)

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