Write What Ya Know?

I agree with Janet Burroway that the “write what you know” adage is an unnecessary and demeaning rule.  I’ll say this:  writing what I already know saves time researching facts.  But as I see it, a text requires the same amount of time commitment scrutinizing it for logical plot flaws.

“At some point you have to move beyond that,” Allegra Goodman recently told the New York Times Magazine. ”You have to know more, you have to learn more. If we all wrote about our childhood forever, books would be rather monotonous.”

Oh…write what you know on a Word document.  I’m having a bitch of a time transcribing my last notebook of drafts onto my laptop, a legacy of a year without a home computer.