'Write what you know'

The old standby about writing about things, places, people that you recognize or understand is similar to 'feed a fever, starve a cold' or ... my favorite, 'there's more than one way to skin a cat.'

What's important here is that the bullshit that continues to run downstream is never evaluated for anything. It's either accepted or dismissed as unstated fact.

Unproven.

Why do you even need to skin a cat?

Why do you write?

If you write, you ought to have enough gumption to at least ask why a fever needs to be fed. If you aren't inclined to even ask that question, then why are you even in the fucking room?

Somebody needs to question all this.

Writing what you know ought to include having enough brains to listen to what's being said, why and when it even mattered.

Margaret Mitchell did not appear in real life during the Siege of Atlanta. She wrote a novel about it because she was intelligent enough to read about it. Therefore, she wrote about what she knew.

She got educated.

The current trend is to promote writing about the 'marginalized' groups, which is a convenient way of saying, we expect you to fail because you didn't even bother to ask about why cats needed to be skinned.

Or how much fun is in a barrel of monkeys. Why are monkeys in a barrel?

Seems like marginalized people are the ones who don't know enough to write about anything. If you were never outside the Earth's atmosphere, how can you write about space travel? What is space travel and why do we even bother with it? There isn't anything out there, at least anything that's truly useful.

Did you bother to think that through?

Margaret Mitchell did just that.

You need to know about life, not just pitter down the cliches that allow us to actually accept that God works in mysterious ways, because if it ain't on Facebook, it's a lie.

Write what you know. Your fever will be happier that way.

The cold? Not so much.

Pretending people of the alphabet marginalization throng needs to have literature written for them, about them, sympathetic to their voice ... what about this did you miss in the conversation?

If pandering to your own beliefs is your way of writing what you know, it's that you know what somebody else wants and you are by-God gonna deliver.

The part about writing what you know is way more complex than that. It's telling you something.

Pay attention.