Write what you know.
This advice floats around every writing circle. It is in creative writing guides, hallowed Paris Review interviews, and uttered by authors on literary panels at festivals. My first brush with it was way back at the University of Cape Town, when I was floundering through a creative writing seminar. That six-month course, to date, happens to be all of the “formal” creative writing education I have received. Everything else has come from one or two workshops here and there over the years and, thankfully, access to free online resources because when you love something you figure out a way to do it.
Regardless of the medium of instruction, “write what you know” was always listed as the primary starting point for writers: write about what you have seen, what you have heard, the way something felt when you touched it, the taste of food, and the hardships and joys that you have personally experienced.
What you know, the advice said, is certain. And certainty, allegedly, provided the best foundation for creative commencement and permitted a writer to plough from the start of their writing to its conclusion, from one end of the word count to the other.
This is what I was told.
It is true.
But not all the way true.
Writing about what you know is like crossing a furniture-laden room just after the lights have been switched off and your eyes are yet to acclimatise to the fresh absence of light. A couple of milliseconds ago you knew how far it was to the couch—two steps, maybe three—but in the dark—“Ouch!”—you stub your toe because the coffee table is a lot closer than you thought. “Fuck!” There goes your left shin. And—“Sweet Lord Jesus!”—what just brushed against your knees? You thought you knew this room well. But the walls are not where you thought they would be. The chairs have moved. The shapes, textures, and sizes of things have morphed in the dark. Nonetheless, if you know the general direction of the door and angle towards it, bit by bit, you will make your way to it, albeit with some bumps and scrapes.
That is what a lot of writing is like for me: stumbling around in a dark in a room I thought I knew, and feeling my way forward a bit at a time. Generally, I know where the ending I have hoped for is, and I know where some important route markers are in a piece of writing (because, hey, outlines save lives).
The opposite of writing about what you know, of course, is to write about what you do not. This, in my opinion, merely pushes any writer to what they do know: gravity and the predictability of sunrises and sunsets, habitual character markers (ways of speaking and dressing, careers and employment frustrations, or relationship and romantic crutches), or conflicts pulled from past or present thematic curiosities and investigations. This, I think, is because unfamiliar settings—real or imagined—are magnetic for the familiar. In a dark room, the first thing one feels for are the walls. In a foreign place, one looks for colour or creed to find community. And in a fantastical or exotic story, one feels comfortable commencing the narrative in a kingdom (or galaxy) far, far away.
Do you see where I am going with this? You use what you know to write about what you do not and vice versa. Everything, eventually, comes back to the same place. For me, what matters with any piece of writing—fiction, nonfiction, or poetry—is what will be used in its creation and, most importantly, whether the story is written or not.
Typically, when cooking up any piece of writing, I will have the following on the table:
- imitation (what I have read in books, heard in songs, seen in films, or noticed in art of all kinds that have resonated with me),
- observation (research, or what I have seen to be true in the world),
- experience (what I have personally waded through),
- intuition (what I think or feel to be true),
- language (the breadth and depth of my vocabulary in any serviceable language),
- space (where I find myself emotionally and physically when I write),
- and time (that abundant and scarce commodity).
Putting these things together, in any combination thereof, gets me a story of some kind.
All writers, I think, have these at their disposal—they may vary the quantities, favouring imitation over observation, or experience over intuition, or lean all the way into language to concoct particular kinds of stories, but, essentially, they start with the same ingredients.
The hardest of all the ingredients to master is time. It really is a bitch. The sooner one comes to grips (or terms) with it, the better one’s writing becomes.
***
When I was writing Crunchy, Green Apples (or, Omo)—a short story that uses a family’s grocery list to explore an aching loss—I remember thinking I was safe because I was writing about what I knew: being raised in a working class family; looking forward to Friday afternoon tea with rare Romany Creams for a treat; and eating brown bread when the family budget was not balancing properly. I thought writing about these things would be easy because, well, I am the product of such an upbringing. I am intimately familiar with the grocery lists of that segment of Windhoek life that aspires to own things, to use things without rationing, and purchase and discard without having to consider diminishing marginal utilities. I felt confident in leading the character through a short story.
Observation, experience, language, space, and (some) time—check.
I put the grocery list down on paper and sat down to write.
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“Ngamije is undeniably an excellent stylist, able to delight, amuse and horrify in equal measure, and Only the Stars Know the Meaning of Space, which feels more connected and cohesive the further you read, is an exciting and fresh approach to a work of collected fictions.” — The Los Angeles Times
***
What I assumed to be a simple story quickly became complicated. The things that held visceral, character-shaping memories were not the ones I had in my draft; what I assumed to be the central drama was, actually, quite peripheral—important, but not integral; and, the language changed, too, in response to the chosen narrative voice.
Crunchy, Green Apples grew into something more complex, still true to my original intention—but richer, more bruised. It became a story with a story to tell. The things I knew did not amount to much, really, so I had to lean into what I did not and discover the rest of the story through the writing.
It is that nexus between what is known and unknown that separates storytellers from other writers—people who tell stories commit to “imagine-fill” the gaps between spaces, times, conflicts, and characters.
Ilana Masad, reviewing Only Stars Know The Meaning Of Space for the Los Angeles Times, wrote that the book felt like the act of “transforming a story collection into a laboratory for experimentation.” She is correct in a way: the space between allows a writer to play around with all of the ingredients at their disposal to see what yields the desired (or unexpected) results. In my case, it was the goal to write stories that engaged the reader in interesting ways, not only through their content, but also with the form—the way in which the writing was encountered.
In the end, it really does not matter where you start or how you start, just that you do.
***
POSTSCRIPT: At some point, as an artist, you have to take a long, hard, and unflinching look at your praxis and find out where the creative blockages are and then ask yourself if they are of your own making or not. This, after all, is your life, and the trick is not to look away. Time to clean my fountain pens, prepare my notebooks, dust my camera lens, and backup my hard drives because I do not want a year that starts with me putting the whole calendar in rice, first, and then the bin, next.
READ: “The Moon Is On Wellbutrin” by Diannely Antigua (Poetry Foundation) • “Hanya’s Boys” by Andrea Long Chu (Vulture) • “Literatea, 10: Disturbing The Archive” by Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu (Doek! Literary Magazine) • “In Memoriam: James Baldwin” by Rémy Ngamije & Ed Pavlic (Best American Essays) • Spectral Evidence by Gregory Pardlo • “Literatea, 11: A Sleeper Agent In Your Own Life” (Doek! Literary Magazine), “City Of Kismet” (Aeon), “Hoarseness: A Legend Of Contemporary Cairo” (The White Review), “I, Ghost” (Guernica), and “Requiem For A Suicide Bomber” (The Atlantic) by Youssef Rhaka | WATCH: Arcane, season 2 (2024) • Black Doves, season 1 (2024) • Conclave (2024) • Day Of The Jackal, season 1 (2024) • Dune: Prophecy, season 1 (2024) • How To Train Your Dragon (2010) • How To Train Your Dragon 2 (2014) • How To Train Your Dragon 3: The Hidden World (2018) • Joan Didion: The Centre Will Not Hold (2017) • Secret Level, season 1 (2024) • Squid Games, season 2 (2024) | LISTEN: “State Of Emergency” by BANTU featuring Megaloh • “Twinz (Deep Cover ‘98)” by Big Pun and Fat Joe • “This Is Who I Am” by Celeste • “Take Five” by Dave Brubeck • “The Space Between” by The Dave Matthews Band • “Remember Me” by d4vd • “Laa” by El Sawareekh • “The Cure And The Cause” by Fish Go Deep, Tracey K, and Dennis Ferrer • “At The River” by Groove Armada • Interstellar OST by Hans Zimmer • “Let’s Go Back” by Jungle • “Heatstroke” by Khalid • “Fantastic” by King Princess • “Die With A Smile” by Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars • “Always Waiting”, “Black Man In A White World”, “Cold Little Heart”, “Home Again”, “Love And Hate”, “One More Night” by Michael Kiwanuka • “Spin The Wheel” by Mick Wingert • “Rome Wasn’t Built In A Day” and “Undress Me Now” by Morcheeba • “Dwarrowdelf (Mines Of Moria)”, “Gandalf’s Fall (The Bridge Of Khazad-Dûm)”, “He’s A Pirate (Duel Of The Fates)”, “Interstellar Docking Theme”, “Into The West”, “Like A Dog Chasing Cars”, “Mountains (No Time For Caution)”, “Now We Are Free (Honour Him)”, “One Day”, “Rohirrim Charge”, and “Uruk-Hai March” by Pianistec • “Everything In Its Right Place” (original and choral version) by Radiohead • “Soundtrack Of The Disconnect: A Playlist From The Eternal Audience Of One by Rémy Ngamije • “Wasteland” by Royal & The Serpent • “Pitch Black” by Sencit featuring Lady Blackbird • “That Part” by Schoolboy Q featuring Kanye West • “Ma Meilleur Ennemie” by Stromae and Pomme • “This Is Your Life” by Switchfoot • “Misty Mountains” by The Wellermen • “The Line” by Twenty One Pilots | PLAY: Cyberpunk 2077 (2023) | TRY: fighting the algorithm.