The Trap of “Write What You Know”

It’s the very first thing they tell you. You’re sitting in a squeaky folding chair at your first writing workshop, clutching a notebook full of half-baked ideas, and someone with a nice smile says, “Write what you know.”

Everyone nods. It sounds so grounded and sensible.

And if you’re anything like I was years ago, you leave that room, look at your own life, and feel a creeping sense of dread. Because what did I actually know? I knew suburban strip malls. I knew the inside of a community college classroom. I knew the specific, dull ache of having a crush on a barista who misspelled my name every single day.

Thrilling material for a sweeping epic, right?

But I tried. I wrote a whole novel about a disillusioned barista named Eva who makes latte art and pines for a regular customer. It was competent. It was quiet. It was so deathly boring that my own mother pretended to lose her reading glasses for six months just to avoid finishing it.

I eventually shoved that manuscript into a drawer, and once the grief cleared, I started to question that tidy little phrase. “Write what you know” hadn’t felt like helpful advice; it felt like a padlock on my imagination. It kept whispering that I didn’t have permission to wander. And I think a lot of writers feel that same pressure—people who are so afraid of getting something “wrong” that they never write anything that feels truly alive.

So here is what I’ve come to believe, built on the ashes of a dozen discarded drafts: “Write what you know” can be limiting if we take it too literally. The stories that truly connect with readers—and with us as writers—often come from a braver place: write what you can imagine.

The Cage of Lived Experience

To understand why this old rule can hold us back, we have to look at how it got warped. Originally, “write what you know” was a gentle nudge toward emotional honesty. It meant: use your real experiences with grief, jealousy, joy, or loneliness so your fiction feels genuine.

But over time, it turned into a rigid rulebook. People started taking it literally, as if you should stick strictly to the demographics, geographies, and jobs you’ve personally lived. If you’re a nurse, write medical dramas. If you’re a teacher, set your story in a school.

This literal reading can do two unfortunate things:

It tells regular people with regular lives that their imagination is limited.

It pressures writers from marginalized backgrounds to constantly harvest their own real‑world trauma for public consumption, or risk being called “inauthentic.”

It mistakes the raw data of a life for the actual soul of a story.

Look, I’ve lived a pretty lucky, fairly quiet life. If I only wrote what I literally know, my books would be about procrastinating on deadlines, negotiating with a toddler to eat peas, and the existential dread of the DMV. That’s not fiction; that’s a diary with a thesaurus.

But my Kaya Papaya books are about a child navigating the world through a different lens—something I’ve never personally experienced as a child, but that I can imagine with empathy and care. And my psychological thrillers take me into the minds of detectives, criminals, and ordinary people in extraordinary trouble. I’ve never been any of those things. Yet readers tell me those stories feel real.

The emotional core of those books—isolation, the hunger for discovery, the fear of being forgotten, the weight of guilt—that I knew from my own life. The specific plots and settings? Pure imagination, backed up by research until they felt solid.

Imagination is a Muscle, Not a Daydream

Let’s clear up a misconception: writing from your imagination doesn’t mean writing out of ignorance. It’s not about lying on a couch waiting for a magical lightning bolt. The kind of imagination I’m talking about is disciplined, curious, and tough.

It’s the part of your brain that says, “I don’t know anything about deep‑sea welding, but I can learn enough to picture it clearly. And then I can ask: What happens if that welder finds something impossible?”

When you only rely on what you’ve actually done, your database is finite. You can only mine your own memories so many times before you run dry. But imagination is a bottomless well. It lets you mix the known and the unknown into something completely new.

You can write about a dragon who hoards existential dread instead of gold, or a woman who slowly turns into a tree as her memory fades. We haven’t lived those things, but they hit us hard because they make an emotional truth visible in a way a straight memoir never could.

I once talked with a retired accountant who wanted to write a space opera. He was completely paralyzed by a literal reading of “write what you know.”

“I’ve never been to space,” he told me, looking almost ashamed. “I only know spreadsheets.”

So we talked about spreadsheets. He explained the feeling of perfect order, the fear of a tiny error, and that gut‑wrenching moment when one wrong cell corrupts a massive financial model. That conversation stuck with me. His space opera became the story of a navigation officer whose single, tiny coordinate error strands a generation ship in the middle of nowhere.

He had to research the silence of space and the hum of the engines. But the soul of the story—the horror of a small mistake ballooning into a catastrophe—he knew that intimately. He just hadn’t realized it was transferable.

Emotional Truth is Portable

This is the whole point: human emotions are universal. The sting of betrayal, the rush of a new crush, the weight of guilt—they travel anywhere. You don’t need to have been a samurai to write about one; you just need to know what it feels like to be trapped by a code of duty, or to have your desires clash with your obligations. If you can overlay that real feeling onto a well‑researched, vividly imagined version of feudal Japan, your story will feel more authentic than a dry list of historical facts written by someone who lacks empathy.

I grew up outside Detroit, right near the Great Lakes, so I’ve always been around water. But even if I hadn’t, I could still write about the ocean. I don’t know how to sail, but I know what it feels like to be a tiny, fragile vessel up against a massive, uncaring force—because I’ve felt that way as a parent, as a former truck driver navigating dangerous highways, and as a writer staring at a blank page.

The ocean is just the stage I can build for a real emotion I’ve lived through. The technical stuff about knots and tides? That comes from books and interviews. The soul comes from my own sleepless nights.

Fiction isn’t court testimony. It’s alchemy. The raw material isn’t fact; it’s feeling, run through the engine of “what if?”

The Danger of the “Authenticity Trap”

There’s a darker side to a rigid “write what you know” that we don’t always talk about: it can act as a gatekeeper.

Sometimes this rule is used to tell writers from marginalized backgrounds that they should only write about their specific identity or trauma. Meanwhile, writers from more dominant cultures are given more freedom to imagine. It becomes a silencing tactic disguised as writing advice.

The solution isn’t to force everyone to stay inside their own demographic boxes. That sounds exhausting and hollow. The solution is to let every writer imagine freely, while demanding that we all do it with responsibility, deep empathy, and serious research.

Imagine any world or character you want, but do the work. If you’re writing a character whose background is vastly different from yours, listen to real people from that community. Read their work. Try to understand their interior lives instead of just guessing. Imagination isn’t an excuse for lazy stereotypes; it’s a call to radical empathy. It’s saying, “I haven’t lived your life, but I am going to work incredibly hard to understand it so I can do it justice.”

Write What You Want to Know

Somewhere along the line, people started confusing “imagination” with “laziness”—like we’re just spinning random fantasies without opening a book. But real imagination is starving for facts. It devours history books, oral histories, YouTube tutorials on blacksmithing, and old travel diaries. Research is the scaffolding that keeps your wild ideas from collapsing.

I love a phrase a friend shared with me recently: write what you want to know.

This changes the energy from passive remembering to active curiosity. When I start a book, I’m chasing an obsession, not checking my credentials. I want to know what it feels like to solve a cold case in a small town, or what it’s like to be a child who sees the world differently than everyone else. I don’t know those things yet, but the ache to figure them out is what drives the writing.

When you write from a place of discovery, the book feels different than if you’re just writing from the safety of what you already know. The reader can feel that excitement on the page.

Practical Ways to Expand Your Imagination

If the old rule has been hammered into your brain for years, letting go can feel like jumping off a cliff without a parachute. Here are a few ways to stretch those muscles:

• Find the emotional anchor first: Before you build a crazy new world, figure out the core feeling. Is it the fear of being replaced? The loneliness of power? You already know that emotion. Now, build an unexpected, imagined container for it.

• Keep a curiosity list: Dedicate a notebook to things you want to learn, not things you already know. Mine right now includes: What does a 17th‑century spice warehouse smell like? How does a deaf musician experience an orchestra? Eventually, one of these questions will spark a character.

• Use the “felt sense” trick: You can’t visit Narnia, but you can walk through a snowy woods, feel the crunch under your boots, and notice how quiet the air gets when it snows. Take that sensory detail and transplant it into your fictional world. The biting cold of a winter morning can easily become the cold of deep space.

• Mix the strange with the familiar: Take a scene you know inside out—like a tense family dinner—and change just one major detail. Maybe the grandmother is a retired spy. Maybe the casserole causes short‑term memory loss. Watch how real human dynamics play out against something totally unreal.

• Treat mistakes as drafts, not crimes: When you write outside your comfort zone, you will mess up. Your first draft might lean on a cliché. That’s okay. That’s why we edit, use beta readers, and have the humility to fix it. The mistake isn’t trying; the mistake is giving up because it’s hard.

Leave the Front Porch

Think about the books that shaped our world. Did J.R.R. Tolkien know what it felt like to be a hobbit? No, he was a linguistics professor who fought in the trenches. But he knew the horrors of industrial war and the beauty of a vanishing countryside, and he turned those real feelings into Middle‑earth.

Did Octavia Butler actually time‑travel back to antebellum Maryland in Kindred? No. She researched, she felt, she imagined, and she gave us something that feels more profoundly true than a textbook ever could.

Every single one of these masterpieces would have been diminished if the authors had stuck only to their own backyards. They wrote what they could imagine, and by doing that, they showed us who we are.

Your life is the soil everything grows from—your heartbreaks, your weird habits, the specific sound of your mom’s laugh. Those things are precious. But you aren’t a copy machine; you’re a world‑builder. Your job isn’t to just copy down your diary and call it a novel. Your job is to take that raw human experience, toss it into the fire of your wildest “what‑ifs,” and make something completely new.

So the next time someone tells you to “write what you know,” just smile, nod, and give yourself permission to wander. Write the book that scares you a little. Write the character who looks nothing like you, until you get so far inside their head that you forget where you end and they begin.

Great fiction doesn’t just show us what we’ve already seen. It hands us a flashlight and says, “Hey, look over there, past the edge of the map. Let’s go see what it is.” And you can’t take that trip if you never leave your own front porch.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, Pepper just lifted her head from my lap and gave me a look that says it’s time for a fresh mug of coffee. Keep imagining, friends.

— Harvey