Write What You Know

Life repeats art because our art reflects our lives.

As a writer I have been taught my whole life to write what I know. Unfortunately I took that very literally at the beginning of my career. I thought well heck, my life is kind of boring, I better get out there and do some living.

I became quite obsessed with traveling and tried to get out more and meet new people, although I was having the time of my life it started getting costly and hard to keep up with and my writing was still stale and stagnant.

Once again something so simple can so easily be left unnoticed with out an outer voice there to guide you. Through my pursuit of living more, so I'd have something exciting to write about, I realized a thing called an imagination. We can feed ourselves ideas through our living and people we encounter but it does not have to be so literal. I think the idea is to tap into the emotions and then use those truest sentiments to create an elaborate exciting story. How things went down may not be true but the conviction was real and that is what your readers latch on to.

Universality is the key, tap into something we all know and feel, so that gives your readers the ability to put themselves in your shoes. I do not know how many times I heard a song on the radio that provoked an emotional outburst, or a passage I read, where I thought to myself I know exactly what they mean. They could have been on a boat ride and I may have never been on a boat, but if the emotion fit, I cared no more about the ride but the feelings the story provoked. That opens a world into your mind and you start putting your own story in its place. It took a total stranger to reach out to me in order for me to grasp this concept, yes, I admit, sometimes I'm a little slow on the uptake.

Once I received an email from this stranger after she had heard a song I wrote about my

Pencil Sketch by Rebecca Hosking of her Mother

Mother's passing, called, YOUR NEW HOME. She went on to tell me about her daughter who recently had passed away from leukemia. She told me it felt like I wrote the song specifically for her. Losing her child was the most devastating moment in her life, as the loss of my Mother was for me. She put her story into mine and felt comfort from it.The positive spin on something so heart breaking is that by her reaching out to me she gave me something back, for both of our losses we gained something new, a comforting SMILE.

 

That was the most rewarding moment of my life, I knew not only did the song mean something to me, but I was able to touch a universal emotional chord, which meant I was doing my job right. I think that moment impacted me so profoundly it changed my writing for the better from that point forward. I will forever be in debt to that woman, she gave me the courage to continue pursuing my music and writing career from a new perspective.