The advice ‘write what you know’ is familiar territory for anyone embarking on literary creation, and it is the reason why so many first novels are startlingly similar to the author’s real life.
The first book I wrote was about a woman returning to work after having children. I’ve never worked as an estate agent, and my husband hasn’t left me (yet), but the rest was simply a funnier, more colourful account of my life with three under-threes. That book was my practice novel: the book I had to write, in order to find my voice. In writing it I began to learn about character, and plot, and all the other elements involved in a 100,000-word story.
Whether you’re writing short stories, poems, novels or novellas, writing what you know makes it easier to connect with your content, and consequently with your reader. But a writer doesn’t need to have lived through an event to understand it – they just need to have experienced the emotions associated with it, whether that be jealousy, loss, longing, guilt, love, happiness, joy…
‘Write what you know’ is misleading. It is not the situation you should know inside out, but the emotion behind it, because it is emotion which propels a reader further into the story. In I LET YOU GO there is a mixture of both: my police background certainly made it easier to visualise scenes set in a police station, or in a victim’s house, and I hope the writing is authentic as a result. But the book is not a police procedural, it is a psychological suspense story which focuses far more on the emotions and relationships of the characters than on the nuts and bolts of the investigation. I don’t know what it feels like to watch my son killed by a hit-and-run car, but I know what it feels like to watch him take his last breath. I know what it feels like to live with loss day in, day out, and to find ways of letting go of the past to embrace the present. In that sense, I write what is achingly, agonisingly familiar to me.