Considering it's horrendously vague and open to interpretation it is by definition bad advice. But paradoxically it's utterly true.
Bad advice is information which you can't do anything with, "make the most of everyday", okay... but how?
Good advice tends to be specific, tailored to a situation and delivered in a way conscious of the recipients resources and skills, and therefore actionable.
Writing what you know is of course essential for a author because if you write about things you don't understand, if you use terminology that means something different to what you think it means, you run the risk of creating artificial or absurd situations which the audience won't comprehend.
Writing is communication, you can only communicate what you have a good grasp on. This is why when we don't know what we don't know it's hard to communicate it or ask relevant questions.
1. Research. Become an expert in something other than your own life
2. Find analogies to your sheltered experience. You might be a NEET but you probably know what it's like to hit a ball into the neighbor's yard and want to get it back... well what if you scaled up the anxiety and feeling about it sitcom style into a parody of Lord of the Rings, it doesn't just work for South Park see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batrachomyomachia
You can write a story about a neet slowly trying to improve from zero to hero. Have the inciting incident be some new hobby he picks up like boxing, or sculpting, and revolve the story around that but with this kind of story it's the characters that matter. It's also your choice to give him a good ending (good endings are generally better for these types of stories) or a bad ending, if you want to write a bad ending you need to showcase his gradual decline like "the joker" film.
>What’s the worst type of writing advice, about the art of it, that you’ve seen, and why?
>I think the worst writing advice, which may no longer be proffered, is “Write what you know.” It’s so often misinterpreted to mean “Write about the world you live in” I’ve never done that, nor have a lot of other writers. Stanley Elkin’s A Bad Man is set in a prison. Before writing the novel, Elkin had never visited a prison or researched was it was like to be in prison. After he published the novel, he had the opportunity to teach creative writing to convicts in a prison. So finally he had a chance to see what a real prison what like. His comment: “I like my prison better.”
I have yet to read anything by Ligotti, but I guess that Kafka knew what he was writing about when he wrote the Metamorphosis >inb4 "of course, he's a juice"
I guess the same applies to that prison book
>It’s so often misinterpreted
I can't imagine being so moronic that you post a quote that you don't even understand.
[...]
have you been diagnosed with autism? You understand that "know" does not mean "experienced literally"
Kafka absolutely knew what isolation and cold familial relationships felt like, you baboon.
said
Of course you have to draw from your experience but you have to mold it into new shapes.
2 years ago
Anonymous
This is exactly what Ligotti said above in the same interview
>On the page, what are the worst ways that a talented writer can self-sabotage or self-betray?
>I don’t know what you mean by “on the page,” but I think the worst way a writer can self-betray is by not being true to his or her experience of being alive. It’s my belief, for what it’s worth, that a lot of writers consign to the page what they think will meet with the approval, especially in the moral realm, of what their society has preached to them since they were children, almost all of which is utter bullshit. This is particularly evident in the practice of screenplay writers who write about characters being “redeemed” in some way or other. That is, whereas a character began with a bad attitude about life, he ends as if he had swallowed whole hog a course in positive thinking. Often this is evident even at the level of personal habits. For instance, a character will smoke copiously at the beginning of a movie, and by the end of the movie he quits because smoking is anti-life and being smoke free is pro-life. In the movie Constantine, Keanu Reeves does this, although at least his cigarette smoking turns out to function materially in the film’s plot.
>It’s so often misinterpreted
I can't imagine being so moronic that you post a quote that you don't even understand.
What do you mean knew? He wrote a strange story about a bug. Kafka wasn't transformed into a bugman in his real or did he?
have you been diagnosed with autism? You understand that "know" does not mean "experienced literally"
Kafka absolutely knew what isolation and cold familial relationships felt like, you baboon.
I think this is a matter of miscommunication why you're acting so buttblasted about it? Not understanding the precise meaning of s sentence is me being an autist? What? Isn't this a bold assumption over a minor linguist inconvenience?
>When one writes, one is not pursuing some private little affair. They really are stupid fools (connards); really, it’s the abomination of literary mediocrity, in every era, but particularly quite recently, that makes people believe that to create a novel, for example, it suffices to have some little private affair, some little personal affair – one’s grandmother who died of cancer, or someone’s personal love affair -- and there you go, you can write a novel based on this. It’s shameful to think things like that. Writing is not anyone’s private affair, but rather it means throwing oneself into a universal affair, be it a novel or philosophy. Now what does that mean?
yes
I don’t think so.
Write only what you don't know
But I'm a subhuman NEET who knows jackshit about life and the outside world. How am I supposed to write about that?
>fountain pen
>papers
Thats how. Gl hf.
>How am I supposed to write about that?
Is that what you want to write about?
Considering it's horrendously vague and open to interpretation it is by definition bad advice. But paradoxically it's utterly true.
Bad advice is information which you can't do anything with, "make the most of everyday", okay... but how?
Good advice tends to be specific, tailored to a situation and delivered in a way conscious of the recipients resources and skills, and therefore actionable.
Writing what you know is of course essential for a author because if you write about things you don't understand, if you use terminology that means something different to what you think it means, you run the risk of creating artificial or absurd situations which the audience won't comprehend.
Writing is communication, you can only communicate what you have a good grasp on. This is why when we don't know what we don't know it's hard to communicate it or ask relevant questions.
1. Research. Become an expert in something other than your own life
2. Find analogies to your sheltered experience. You might be a NEET but you probably know what it's like to hit a ball into the neighbor's yard and want to get it back... well what if you scaled up the anxiety and feeling about it sitcom style into a parody of Lord of the Rings, it doesn't just work for South Park see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batrachomyomachia
a woman wrote this post
I would think a woman would be the one dispensing contextless vague advice instead of criticizing it.
You can write a story about a neet slowly trying to improve from zero to hero. Have the inciting incident be some new hobby he picks up like boxing, or sculpting, and revolve the story around that but with this kind of story it's the characters that matter. It's also your choice to give him a good ending (good endings are generally better for these types of stories) or a bad ending, if you want to write a bad ending you need to showcase his gradual decline like "the joker" film.
There, gave you a story idea.
Absolutly dogshit advice.
Thomas Ligotti on "Writing what you know"
>What’s the worst type of writing advice, about the art of it, that you’ve seen, and why?
>I think the worst writing advice, which may no longer be proffered, is “Write what you know.” It’s so often misinterpreted to mean “Write about the world you live in” I’ve never done that, nor have a lot of other writers. Stanley Elkin’s A Bad Man is set in a prison. Before writing the novel, Elkin had never visited a prison or researched was it was like to be in prison. After he published the novel, he had the opportunity to teach creative writing to convicts in a prison. So finally he had a chance to see what a real prison what like. His comment: “I like my prison better.”
https://wonderbooknow.com/interviews/thomas-ligotti/
I have yet to read anything by Ligotti, but I guess that Kafka knew what he was writing about when he wrote the Metamorphosis
>inb4 "of course, he's a juice"
I guess the same applies to that prison book
What do you mean knew? He wrote a strange story about a bug. Kafka wasn't transformed into a bugman in his real or did he?
more or less what
said
Of course you have to draw from your experience but you have to mold it into new shapes.
This is exactly what Ligotti said above in the same interview
>On the page, what are the worst ways that a talented writer can self-sabotage or self-betray?
>I don’t know what you mean by “on the page,” but I think the worst way a writer can self-betray is by not being true to his or her experience of being alive. It’s my belief, for what it’s worth, that a lot of writers consign to the page what they think will meet with the approval, especially in the moral realm, of what their society has preached to them since they were children, almost all of which is utter bullshit. This is particularly evident in the practice of screenplay writers who write about characters being “redeemed” in some way or other. That is, whereas a character began with a bad attitude about life, he ends as if he had swallowed whole hog a course in positive thinking. Often this is evident even at the level of personal habits. For instance, a character will smoke copiously at the beginning of a movie, and by the end of the movie he quits because smoking is anti-life and being smoke free is pro-life. In the movie Constantine, Keanu Reeves does this, although at least his cigarette smoking turns out to function materially in the film’s plot.
>It’s so often misinterpreted
I can't imagine being so moronic that you post a quote that you don't even understand.
have you been diagnosed with autism? You understand that "know" does not mean "experienced literally"
Kafka absolutely knew what isolation and cold familial relationships felt like, you baboon.
I think this is a matter of miscommunication why you're acting so buttblasted about it? Not understanding the precise meaning of s sentence is me being an autist? What? Isn't this a bold assumption over a minor linguist inconvenience?
Someone post that Deleuze quote about people writing tedious, shit books about their tedious shit lives and how they need to frick off.
Sounds interesting, anyone?
>When one writes, one is not pursuing some private little affair. They really are stupid fools (connards); really, it’s the abomination of literary mediocrity, in every era, but particularly quite recently, that makes people believe that to create a novel, for example, it suffices to have some little private affair, some little personal affair – one’s grandmother who died of cancer, or someone’s personal love affair -- and there you go, you can write a novel based on this. It’s shameful to think things like that. Writing is not anyone’s private affair, but rather it means throwing oneself into a universal affair, be it a novel or philosophy. Now what does that mean?
https://deleuze.cla.purdue.edu/sites/default/files/pdf/lectures/en/ABC-MsRevised-NotesComplete051820_1.pdf
yes but it would probably be better understood if it were phrased "know what you write"
Wow she pretty
What I know is my 10x10 room I haven't left in 10 years and will die unemployed in soon
Can you even write what you don't know? What ever you write comes from your knowledge, so no matter how accurate it is, you're writing what you know.
WRITING WHAT ONE KNOWS IS NOT LITERATURE, BUT JOURNALISM.