Hell knows Tolkien was never a four-foot hobbit climbing a burning volcano with an evil ring trying to take over his mind and a powerful, darkly godlike being trying to stop him from getting there. But if you should only ever ‘write what you know’, how do you get from here to Mordor?
I’ve never been under siege from a crimelord trying to recruit or kill me for the things I know. But I have been scared –and I have been scared enough to want to try and hide, to feel that urge to curl in on myself and make myself small and unnoticeable. Doesn’t matter that it was only because one of my flatmates was on the rampage, or because I was small and the storm outside scared me into my parents’ room in the middle of the night. I know what it is to be afraid, so I can magnify that, build it to become what I want – true terror, a need to disappear.
As you can see, ‘write what you know’ doesn’t have to be taken literally. That’s not to say that you should try to bluff your way through things you have no idea about – don’t try and write a police procedural when you’ve only ever watched CSI on TV – but we’ve all been to school, so why not a magical school, ala Harry Potter? You can fill in the extra details you need around the skeleton of your own experience.
By writing what you know, and extrapolating and magnifying that into what you don’t, you can get a long way. But you do also need to do research. Remember, Google is your friend, if you’re careful about which sources you trust. And you can’t beat your local (large) library for books that could be helpful. If you live near a city, try the city library, or one belonging to a local university might be prepared to let you use their facilities if you ask nicely.
So you’ve never been blind. Spend a couple of hours blindfolded in your room, and use it. That’s all it really takes.
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