Often when writers ask for advice on what exactly they should be writing, they are told to write what they know.

On the surface of it, this isn’t bad advice. If you know about something, you’ll be able to write on it with authority and will hopefully be able to make it believable as you’ll know the ins and outs of what goes on in whatever subject you’re tackling in your writing.

However, should you always just write what you know?

I think the answer has to be no. The thing about the world is that there is an awful lot of stuff out there, and there’s no way we can know all of it. In fact, we can only ever know a relatively small fraction of it. If we just write about the things we know about, we’ll be limiting our subject matter considerably.

Then there’s the fact that if you know something really well, it can be hard to bring artistic license into the mix. You can become concerned with getting everything completely accurate and, in doing so, lose something of the magic of storytelling. There’s often something to be said for making some things up as you go along, but making sure you always do what’s best for the story – even if that means losing a little bit of accuracy in terms of facts.

Plus, we’re always learning. Often we learn through our writing and, through that, become better writers along the way.

Writing what we know can be a very good place to start, but if we’re hoping to really make something special out of our writing, it shouldn’t be the only place we go