I heard that sentence thirty years ago or more. Write what you know. Show us, don’t tell us. Incorporate personal experiences into your fiction writing. And so many more tips, tricks, and advice, all designed to make me a better writer.

And you know what I discovered? I see a lot more than I think I do. I have a wealth of information available in my head. I also have the internet at my fingertips. Taking what I know, I can weave it into the things and situations I don’t know anything about because I have watched and observed countless conversations and situations over fifty years of my life. Some of these become conversations in my stories. Others are drafted so that it reads like a plausible dialogue between two or more people. My experiences are my experiences. No one can take that away from me, nor will they, or should they, write it the same way that I would. Such as taking that last ‘that’ out of the sentence. Should I have edited it out? Deleted it? Or do I keep it because that makes the most sense for me? Plus, it sounds right in my head.

Listening and observing gives me a unique vantage point. It’s like being a spy: you make notes and recall key elements or events, using them to build characters or a storyline. I often find the best ideas in a few sentences someone says to me. Gatorade is one of those freak ideas that came to me after a conversation with a coworker. I had no idea how powerful his anecdote would be nor how much material I could get from a few sentences of conversation. I think it lasted a total of maybe three minutes. Not a lot of time. But just enough to convey the correct elements and be able to make notes about them.

Pulling examples from my own experience, better yet, my pain makes for the best storylines because it’s mine. How did it feel when you kissed a girl for the first time? What was that experience like when you were in the hospital getting your tonsils out? Can you remember what it was like when you sat at the top of the tallest tree on your block, looking out over the neighborhood and seeing what you thought was for miles in every direction? Did you ever come close to drowning in the pool at your friend’s house because his mom wasn’t home and you were goofing around with the pool cover? What was it like when you first danced with a boy or a girl?  

Age and experience give you more to draw from, that’s true. But the act of writing itself? That’s what will or will not make you a better writer and storyteller. You have to be willing to commit to the work. You have to write every day. Or, at the very least, have a word count goal to shoot for. Whether that’s a per-week goal or per day doesn’t matter. The truth is you need to write to get better.

So write what you know. Work hard. Write more and more often. Then you, too, will be a storyteller.