You’ve heard the advice before. You probably don’t want to hear it again, but guess what? I don’t really care. I’m here to tell you what I know to be true, what I think will most help you to succeed as a writer. So the advice so oft repeated it’s become a cliché is still worth looking at: write what you know.

But here’s something you may be thinking (or not). What do I know? What have I experienced that is worth other people reading about? What do I know that is worth writing about?

Let’s figure that out.

First, you need to understand that it’s not your job to put a value on the what you write. It’s not your job to say: yes, this is good, people will like this or no, this is crap, people will hate this. You can’t be both writer and critic.

As a writer – listen, this is important – your job is to write what is bursting to get out of you and then, in a sense, throw it to the wind. You sit and pour it out, you do your best job, you edit and polish, you publish and promote, but you have to give up on the value judgments. You simply can’t do it.

You never know, exactly, if what you write IS valuable or how valuable it is. The people who read it get to decide that. So when questions of value and their relations – am I good enough? Who am I to try and be a writer? I’ve got nothing to say – come pouring in, your job is to send them back out again.

Since the value question is now out of the picture, you can actually look around yourself and your life and find material. You’ve got plenty of sources, even if you’ve never left your home town. You have the exterior and the interior. You have the history, the stories you grew up with, family and myth and legend and oral history. You have the people in your life: all of them walking stories just waiting to be observed and written. And, yup, you’ve got your imagination.

Now: when I say “what you know” that doesn’t mean that, oops, sorry, the only place you can write about is St. Louis, the only people you can write about are your family, and the only things you can write about is what you’ve actually experienced. If that were true, we’d have no great historical novels, no sci-fi, no fantasy, and, most likely, not much romance…

This is the key: figure out what you want to write about and then start getting to know it. Settle into it. Read it. Eat it up. If you want to be a great poet or fantasy writer, then read the great poets and the great fantasy novels. Know them. Make them yours. And then read their biographies, their memoirs, their letters, their books of advice.

Get to know the thing you want to write. Then write it, and you’ll be writing what you know.

Here’s why: you may not recognize the voice of inexperience, but others will. If you don’t know your craft, your subject, your genre, your predecessors, you can trip along in blissful ignorance. But everyone who does happen to read what you write will immediately feel the immaturity and inexperience and will be off-put by it.

You don’t want that. You don’t want a little surface immaturity to blind people to the depth you have and can express. That’s why you need to do the work, to know the subject.

“What others criticize you for, cultivate: it is you.” -Jean Cocteau