“Write what you know” Writing Principle

“Write what you know” Writing Principle is the familiar creative-writing maxim that Wally Lamb sets against his own preferred practice: rather than confining fiction to known experience, he writes toward what he does not know, using imagination to enter other lives. The principle matters here less as a rule he adopts than as a limit he deliberately crosses—and as an ambition that can exact a cost.

The Maxim and Its Counterprinciple

Lamb describes the standard advice as something he does not usually follow. His alternative is to write about what he does not know so that he can live the life of another person and move beyond what he calls the benign prison of his own experience. The contrast is not between knowledge and carelessness: it is between treating personal experience as a boundary and treating fiction as a means of crossing it.

For Lamb, that crossing is both imaginative and sustained. Writing a first-person novel means returning to the same place each day while, in imagination, entering another person’s life and seeing the world from a foreign perspective. The physical routine stays fixed; the point of view travels. This conception turns the maxim inside out: unfamiliar experience is not a disqualification from writing, but the territory the work sets out to explore.

Other Lives and Unfinished Quests

Lamb points to the range of perspectives he inhabited in his fiction. In She’s Come Undone, he wrote as a woman; in I Know This Much Is True, as the embittered twin brother of a man with paranoid schizophrenia. In that latter novel he also wrote in the voice of the protagonist’s grandfather, Domenico Tempesta, a Sicilian immigrant at the turn of the century. When writing in Domenico’s voice, Lamb had no passport and had never traveled beyond the continental United States. The distance between the writer’s circumstances and the character’s life makes the principle concrete: imaginative perspective, rather than matching biography, enables the narration.

The lives Lamb seeks to enter belong to imperfect, unfinished people who leave the safety of home because they want or need something home cannot give them. He frames their movement as a quest or odyssey. In this account, writing beyond what is personally familiar and depicting characters who venture into the unknown share a structure: both require movement away from the secure limits of home.

The Cost of Reaching Beyond Experience

Lamb’s account also records the pressure that accompanied this practice. About a month into writing his second novel, his own writing odyssey nearly ended. His first novel had taken nearly nine years, written alongside hands-on parenting, full-time high-school teaching, and early weekend hours set aside for fiction. Exhaustion, fear that he was a one-shot wonder, and the sense that he was disappointing people all threatened to stop the work.

The responsibilities were specific and competing: his children, wife, and ailing parents needed him, as did his students. His characters, meanwhile, were neglected for long stretches, stranded on an island he could not seem to reach. That image qualifies the freedom promised by writing about the unfamiliar. The novelist may travel beyond the boundaries of personal experience, but the journey depends on time and attention that other obligations can interrupt. The principle is therefore not a simple celebration of limitless invention; it names an aspiration whose imaginative reach must be sustained against the demands of ordinary life.