random.

[2much_estrogen]

Two summers ago I had lunch with a group of friends from a creative writing workshop. We were sitting in the cafe and talking when one friend declared that in order to create great art, one must completely detach themselves from the people around them

Comments

[chibibluebird]

Yes, but knowledge doesn't only come from one's own experience. It also comes from other people's experience.

I usually write about stuff I've read or seen or had told to me or have otherwise heard.

[chibibluebird]

Really? I find sf&f to rely strongly on current cultural norms and societal issues (or reactions to them), current science, and, well, past sf&f works.

[eunuch_dreams]

What? Isaac Asimov, Arthur C Clarke, H G Wells, all way ahead of their time (but with different amounts of accuracy). Arthur C Clarke predicted there would be satellites decades before anyone even thought of them.

[mithfalas]

well. I think the things that a writer expresses through a story or any other piece of literature is something that is shared by mankind as a whole.

While I suppose that a person could write about something they have never experienced, or never empathized with, I doubt anyone would have much motivation to do so. It seems kind of backwards to try to share something that you don't even have yourself.

[kvschwartz]

A great writer doesn't have to have experienced something to write brilliantly about it. Tolstoy wrote about marriage before he himself got married. Shakespeare was never a king or a queen or an Austrian or a Moor.

But generally speaking, the more you know about something, the greater confidence with which you can write about it, and a reader needs to FEEL that the writer knows everything there is to know about the subject.

[lackaday]

Depends on what kind of writing we're talking about. Plenty of people write good Westerns who have never been west of the Ole Miss, esp. before 1900; and surrealism, well, you know.

If we're talking realism, though, I think there are plenty of good writers who don't nec. "write what they know," but now that I think about it, the best writers might; as kvschwartz sez above, the more you know about yr subject, the more confidently you can write about it.