Write what you think you know

The adage about writing what we know is always a policy that makes sense. I really don't know much about hiking in the Sahara, but I can say that I'd be accurate in describing it as hot and dry without much chance of getting a ride to the nearest gas station.

Don't run out of gas. I actually did that once, so I can safely write about it with some degree of enthusiasm.

I recall getting my first PC about 20 years ago and snooping around for various websites that discussed writing. Never did I have any illusions about the craft. Writing what one knows is hardly enough if one has no idea how to structure a piece of prose that's more than five or six pages long. 

So I wrote a couple of crappy novels, and I pawned them off on an e-book operation that promised me millions in royalty. Clueless, we all were. The E-book industry looked like a comer at the time. I think it missed its window and suffered broken fingers, I think I sold 3 novels.

Anyway, I still have the manuscripts for those classics and don't intend to even read them again. Well, someday ....

The funny part was, I also tripped over a few other things. Then one day, I decided to write a porn novel. No agenda, no plan, no plot ... just included as much profanity, sex and combinations thereof. I just wanted to see if I could write one. I think it took me a week. I offered it to this woman who had an "erotica" website and she took it. I made a couple of hundred dollars off the thing over a dozen years.

I sold a couple of others to a different outfit. The stuff wasn't so much porn as it was just fun stories with people doing sexual things. I called it blue-collar romance, or love stories about people who were considering being in love.

I still have that stuff around here too and have considered recasting it with a little less gravy and a few more potatoes.

But what I learned along the way is that you don't always have to write what you know. What you first need to do is learn how to write. Novels are hard work. The reward is awesome.

It's almost better than getting laid.