Guest Novelist Cathy Parker: Yes, Writing What You Know Is Exciting!
Write what you know—any craft article or book will so advise you. You read this advice and you think: What I know could put a cowboy to sleep during a steer riding contest.
I beg to differ.
Write Yourself. Today let’s limit ourselves to what you know best: yourself. The trick is to write “you,” as the character, and then supercharge what you know: tweak and twist “yourself,” drop “yourself” into unexpected places and crises for unexpected reasons.
You are the undercoat, and the undercoat consists of your experiences, occupation(s), and personality traits (cerebral, social, loner, mixer, one friend or one hundred, quick temper, calm as the sea at slack tide, voluble, silent, energetic or laid back?). Paint your characters with these traits. Create a “why” for such traits, or create your exact opposite. Or imagine taking such traits to the extreme—the uses are endless.
Pay attention to your idioms. Your pattern of speech. The way you interact with people. What, when and how you eat. Sleep patterns. Your relationship with animals. And on and on it goes. How could you create with what you see in yourself?
Details count in creating characters. Look yourself over. Notice what’s there. Find a way to use it. Your hair for example: what if something interesting happens because of a character’s hair? Maybe your protagonist falls down a crazy rabbit hole because he answers an ad for a clinic treating baldness. Maybe your character’s fortunes change the day she gives up trying for the long hair she’ll never have, and gets a short dynamite cut.
Know, and then imagine. This is only the beginning. You still have your experiences from childhood through school and all the big and little jobs you’ve held or wanted but didn’t get, stayed at or left. Friends. Vacations. Family. All stepping off points for the imagination.
What you know will give your work truth.
What you imagine will give your work wings.
Come on now, go out and write what you now know!
Cathy Parker is a former journalist and attorney. She can be contacted through her website, AuthorCathyParker.com. Her book Power of Three is available on-line, and the sequel, Power Multiplied is available for preorder. Subscribers to Cathy’s newsletter who send digital proof of preordering will be receiving three stories surrounding her Power Rising Trilogy.
