Have Fun with Your Fiction, Part III - Experiential Fiction

Writers are not infrequently given advice that goes a little something like this: "Write what you know." This piece of advice typically suggests writing about topics you are moderately to expertly knowledgeable of. If you don't know what an atom is, you shouldn't be writing science fiction. If you've never experienced deep hurt or great love, it might be difficult for you to write realistic or relatable fiction based in either of those topics. For example, I once wrote a romantic story of a single father who falls in love with the single and cancer-recovering mother who happens to be a favorite person of his daughter; meanwhile, the daughter meets and begins to fall for the son of the woman. All this happens in the midst of the turmoil of one family's struggle to deal with the loss of a family member and divorce, and the other family's battle with the broken relationship between mother and son. I had a teacher read parts of the story. Her comments made the "Write what you know" advice all the more potent to me. "It's okay," she told me, "but you can't possibly really know what you're talking about." To this trusted advisor, the most realistic portions of the narrative were the young girl's journal entry interjections into the story's plotline. Her journal entries were actually snippets from my own journals.