This is K.M. Wyland and you are listening to the 600 third episode of the Helping Writers Become Authors

podcast. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Do you need personal

experience to write about something.

We writers like to think of ourselves as metaphoric magicians sitting at our desks spinning

worlds out of nothing but words and imagination.

Pour a little research into the recipe and our alchemy is complete.

Yet an ongoing question amongst writers is the evergreen quandary about whether or not we must write what we know.

In short, do you need personal experience in order to write about something?

In sorting through my email archives last week, I came upon an email I'd forgotten I'd

saved from a young writer asking this very question.

He pointed to such classical giants as Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Orwell, who

all experienced firsthand what they famously fictionalized, hefty topics such as war, migrant workers, and communism.

The email asked with plain spoken authenticity, how does someone like me write something

that has substance when I haven't experienced much of the real world.

The answer to must you write what you know is a qualified no, because sooner or later we all must write what we don't know.

Hemingway, Steinbach, and Orwell did it and so must you and I.

We are writing fiction after all. By definition we're making it up.

Depending on the story we may end up writing about things we can't experience.

For instance if you're writing about a character who is dying, that isn't

something you can experience yourself and live to tell the tale. For that matter, any time you

write a character who is anything other than a carbon copy of your genetic and psychological makeup,

so pretty much every character you write, you're going to be writing something outside your experience, something you don't know.

...