'Write What You Know' Is Only Half the Advice
A contest judge argues that the famous advice gets misread as a fence around your biography, when it was always a door. Includes a five-step ledger for writing beyond your own life.
A young poet stayed behind after a workshop I ran and said, almost apologetically, "I want to enter contests, but nothing has ever happened to me." She was nineteen. She had moved countries twice, nursed a dying grandmother, and once gone three days without speaking to anyone. Nothing had ever happened to her. What she meant, of course, was that she had taken "write what you know" literally, checked her life against the news, and found it unworthy of poems. That conversation is why I distrust the advice as it is usually given. Write what you know is real wisdom, but only half of it survives repetition, and the missing half is the part that makes poets.
What 'Write What You Know' Was Supposed to Mean
The advice did not begin as a command to write autobiography. It began as a warning against fakery: do not decorate your poems with experiences you are only pretending to understand. In that narrow sense it is unimprovable. When I score a poem about war written by someone whose entire knowledge of war is other war poems, I can feel it by line three. The details are all secondhand: the mud, the letters home, the distant thunder of guns. Borrowed images have a particular deadness, like flowers pressed in someone else's book.
But somewhere between the writing manuals and the classroom, the warning hardened into a fence. Poets started believing their material was limited to events they could prove attendance at. That reading would have disqualified most of the poems we love. It would have disqualified Emily Dickinson, who barely left Amherst and wrote about the sea, the moor, eternity, and death from the inside. She answered the whole debate in four lines, published in 1890:
I never saw a moor,
I never saw the sea;
Yet know I how the heather looks,
And what a wave must be.
She never saw the moor. She knew the heather anyway. That is the half of the advice nobody quotes.
Knowledge Is Not Events. It Is Texture.
Here is the reframe I offer every poet who thinks their life is too small: you do not know events, you know textures. You may never have stood in a war, but you know waiting for news that could break you. You may never have lost a child, but you know the specific silence of a house after someone leaves it. The event is the costume. The texture is the body, and textures transfer.
A poem I scored last spring made this unforgettable for me. It was set on Mars, of all places, a colonist watching Earth rise, and by any literal standard the poet knew nothing about it. But the poem was really about homesickness, and the poet plainly knew homesickness down to the bone. One line described Earth as "the porch light left on for no one," and I sat back from my desk. Whoever wrote that had stood outside a childhood home they could not enter anymore. Mars was invented. The porch light was known. The poem scored higher on emotion than almost anything that month.
Write what you know is a starting line, not a property line.
The Half Nobody Quotes: Write Toward What You Don't
The full advice, the version I wish workshops taught, goes like this: begin from what you know, then write toward what you do not. A poem that stays entirely inside your certainties has no reason to exist; you could have just said the certainty. The poems that win contests, and more importantly the poems that stay with readers, are the ones where the poet is visibly discovering something mid-poem. Robert Frost made roughly this point about surprise: if the writer learns nothing during the writing, the reader will learn nothing during the reading.
In practice this means your known material is the launch pad, not the destination. The pattern looks like this:
- You know your father's hands; you do not know why you keep writing about them.
- You know the apartment you left; you do not know what you were actually grieving when you locked the door.
- You know the sound of your name in one particular mouth; you do not know when it started meaning something else.
The known detail buys the reader's trust. The unknown question gives the poem somewhere to go. If you are stuck on what such questions look like, our library page on what to write poems about is built around exactly this pivot from material to mystery.
A Worked Example: The Same Poem, Both Halves
Let me show the difference on the page. Here is a stanza written the fenced-in way, all verified biography, no discovery:
My father worked long shifts at the plant.
He came home tired every night.
We didn't talk much at dinner.
I know he loved us anyway.
Every word is true and every word is inert. The poet knew all of this before writing it, so the stanza is a receipt, not a poem. Now the same material, starting from the known and writing toward the unknown:
My father washed the plant off his hands
twice, then a third time, as if the water
knew something. I still scrub like that.
I am still not sure what we are getting off.
The first two lines are knowledge: the ritual, observed a thousand times. The last two lines are the reach. The poet does not know what the scrubbing means, and says so, and that admission is where the poem starts breathing. Notice it is also more honest than "I know he loved us anyway," which is the kind of certainty we write to comfort ourselves rather than to find anything out. Inherited gestures, inherited silences: this is why so many strong contest entries live inside the family theme, where everyone's known material runs deepest and the unknowns run deeper still.
The Know/Don't-Know Ledger: Five Steps for Tonight
When a poem of yours feels flat, run this ledger. It takes fifteen minutes and it has rescued more drafts in my workshops than any other exercise I use.
- List five textures you own. Not events, textures: the sound of a specific door, a smell that means a specific person, a silence you can date. Concrete, sensory, yours.
- List three things you will never know for sure. Why she left. What he was thinking at the end. Whether you would have done it too. These are your poem engines.
- Pair one texture with one unknown. The door sound plus why she left. The pairing is the poem's real subject; the texture is merely its evidence.
- Draft with the texture up front and the unknown at the turn. Open with what you can prove. Pivot, around two-thirds through, to what you cannot. Do not resolve the unknown; aim the poem at it and stop while it is still ringing.
- Audit for borrowed images. Read the draft and mark any image you have seen in other poems but never in life. Replace each one with something from your texture list, however humble. Humble and owned beats grand and rented, every time.
Your Small Life Is the Rare Material
Back to my nineteen-year-old who believed nothing had happened to her. I asked her to describe the three days she went without speaking. She said the strangest part was that her own name started to sound foreign, like a word for someone else. I told her that observation alone was worth more than any battlefield she could fake, because eleven other poets that month would send me battlefields and nobody else on earth could send me that.
This is the practical secret the advice was always guarding. Editors and judges are drowning in poems about the large common events, written from the outside. What we almost never see is the interior of an ordinary life, rendered exactly. Your commute, your kitchen, your particular inherited silence: unfashionable, unphotogenic, and completely unduplicated. When judges at Writory score entries across five criteria, the creativity and emotion marks almost always climb together, and they climb for the poem that could only have come from one person's life reaching past itself. If you have a draft like that, one texture you own aimed at one thing you will never resolve, the monthly contest is a good place to find out what it does to strangers, since every entrant gets the full score breakdown back.
So yes, write what you know. Then stand on it, and write what you don't. The knowing gets the reader to trust you. The not-knowing is why they will remember you. Half the advice makes memoirists. The whole of it makes poets.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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