Are you really supposed to write about only what you know?

Are you really supposed to write about only what you know?

I write strictly about stuff I don't understand

...

Plato thought so, and like everything Plato said, it's _____.

no but you should do research or risk sounding fake or looking like an idiot.

Write about what you understand, not what you know.

obsolete

No OP. Do not stagnate. write what is within your scope but always be expanding your scope.

Writing only what you already had experience in at the time of writing is as monumentally retarded as telling an autistic mongoloid to "just bee himself buzz buzz XD"

nice.jpg

either this or be explicitly wrong
if you write purely from your perspective, you should highlight just how wrong it is

Want a second opinion!

bump

Nah. And anything you can't actually explain blame a wizard or something.

what if you reworded the statement to be know what you write? As in, write about anything, just make sure you know it before actually writing, as in possibly doing some research. Then it wouldn't be stagnating, and also not full of shit. Actually, now that I think of it, if you write about what you don't know without actually learning anything about it, it's still end up being stagnated, since you're not actually growing or expanding your scope

>Shakespeare didn't know anything about being a Danish prince
>Dostoevsky didn't know anything about murdering an old pawnbroker (presumably)
>McCarthy didn't know anything about scalping people (again, presumably)
You can write anything as long as you have the requisite vision.

nope, not important

this

often times it's more interesting to play with the symbols of what people know as whatever youre writing about than trying to provide deep insights about how day trading or some other gay shit works

It's much easier and way more fun to just make shit up

Knowledge in this context has always spoken not to empirical observation but to a metatextual Hemingway-esque "truth"
Literature at its best is not the transmission of information, it is the extrapolation of higher meaning through transmission.

Someone who has never had sex cannot describe the feeling of having sex well. They could probably communicate bitterness or "outsiderness" pretty well.

This is literally the opposite of what every novelist says

but how did pinecone know all about what it's like to be a slave-driver in sudwestafrika? Or precisely what 1899 Florence was like?

He's a wizard?

How do you know what you know? Hmmmmmmmmm?