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(Don't, please, I beg you) Write What You Know

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Perhaps the most often repeated advice to a new writer is "write what you know".  I'm sure that whoever originally came up with this meant well.  Maybe he meant,  Don't try to write about the life experience of an African-American street orphan if you are a white suburban housewife.   Or,  Don't set your book in the glamorous, high-stakes world of the Milan fashion industry if the closest you've ever gotten to couture is the sale rack at Target.  Possibly he just wanted to take some of the scariness away from sitting down in front of a blank page.  Write what you know.  It'll be fine. The main  problem with writing what you know is that what most people know is boring.  You know your job, your town, your family, your friends.  You know your experiences, which, on the whole, are probably pretty ordinary.  The purpose of fiction is to take the reader away from the ordinary, or to take the ordinary and to somehow make it seem extraordinary.  As long as you wr

From the Beginning

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Welcome back! If you are a writer, a wannabe writer, or just someone who likes to know how writers think, this is the place for you.  In upcoming posts we'll talk about how stories are born, how ideas  translate into words, and how words bring thoughts to life -- among many, many other things.  I hope you'll check in often. This blog has been dark for--hard to believe!--9 years, and a lot has changed since then.  It's not that I didn't want to reboot it, it's just that I didn't know where to start.  And the longer I put it off, the harder it became to find that starting point.  Kind of like writing a novel. So you've got this great idea for a book.  You more or less know what happens in your story, you've chosen the characters who will tell your story, and you know what you want to say.  But where do you start?  As a general rule, there are three places to open your book: at the beginning, the middle and the end.  It's up to you to decide whi