by Tari Lynn Jewett

I’m a rule follower. That person who stops at a stop sign, even though there’s no one around… that’s me. I won’t use the ten items or less check-out line with eleven items, even if I have eleven chocolate bars, and I never return my library books late. Well, there was that one time, but I paid my fines and stayed away from the library for more than a year out of shame.

And yet, I have been known to break a few rules. (Don’t tell my parents. Wait, don’t tell my kids!) Sometimes I knew the rules and made a choice, and I’ll admit, sometimes I just didn’t know the rules.

As a writer, (even if you’re not a ‘writer’) there are an overabundance of rules, and I’m likely to break a few in the approximately thousand words of this post. There are punctuation and spelling rules, formatting rules, rules for non-fiction and rules for fiction. There are rules specific to the genre you write, rules of business and etiquette, marketing rules. And to make it more challenging, every now and then the rules change! One of the most basic rules. Write What You Know.

I’ve told this story before, but here it is.

I never considered myself a writer. I mean I wrote. Writing has been my passion since…well, always, but a writer, or maybe I should say A WRITER was someone special, someone with magical power that could transport you to other worlds, someone who offered you the opportunity to live other lives. I just wrote.

So, at twenty-one years old with a nine-month-old baby, I decided that I had all of the answer to parenthood, and that I’d write a parenting column for our local newspaper, The Butterfield Express. (Why yes, I do write in run-on sentences…it’s also how I talk!)

I wrote several sample columns, walked into the offices of The Butterfield Express, and asked to speak to the editor. That was probably the first rule I broke. I didn’t send a query letter, I didn’t make an appointment, I just walked in and asked to speak to an editor. But I didn’t know any better, and they gave me the column.

The second rule that I broke was – Write What You Know.

I’ll give myself credit for thinking I was writing something I knew, but I’ll admit it was pretty naïve. More than forty years later, after raising three boys you couldn’t pay me enough to write a parenting column. I KNOW that I don’t know.

But I wrote that column, and I’m glad it was before the internet, because I’ll be happy if those columns are never seen again! More importantly, I learned a few things about writing and working with a publisher.

What I didn’t learn was that you didn’t walk into an editor’s office unannounced and ask for a column on a topic in which you really had no expertise, so…

…a few years later, I decided I wanted to write a consumer law column for The Moreno Valley News. Despite having no law degree, no legal background of any kind…unless dating a lawyer counts, and being told no one would give me a law column, I prepared several sample columns and marched into the offices of The Moreno Valley News and asked to see an editor.

Maybe I didn’t learn anything from my first experience, because I made the exact same mistakes. I didn’t make an appointment, and I didn’t Write What I Knew.

But they gave me the column, and I probably learned more from this experience.

The third column I wrote was a cooking column for The Antelope Valley Press Enterprise; no, this time I didn’t walk into the office with an envelope of samples and ask to see an editor. This time, the editor called me by accident. Yes, it was a wrong number phone call, and I took the opportunity to pitch a food column…but I still wasn’t writing what I knew. At this point I had a handful of recipes in my repertoire, and they all contained some flavor of cream of -insert a flavor here- soup. Yes, I got the column, and once again, I wrote what I didn’t know.

Making an appointment to see an editor instead of walking into their office unannounced, is probably a rule that should be followed. I might have gotten lucky…twice.

But, writing what you know is a rule that can be broken.

Writing what you know is intrinsic. It’s going to happen while you write, and knowing your subject well, whether you’re writing fiction or nonfiction gives it depth, and helps the reader to connect with your words.

Writing what you don’t know offers an opportunity to explore things you’re curious about, and build new areas of knowledge, and can help your readers to do the same.

I no longer write for magazines and newspaper, my focus is fiction, and while I definitely write about what I know, and my experiences and those others have share appear in all of my stories, I also write about what I don’t know. It’s the curiosity about the things that I don’t know that make me dig deeper, that send me looking for more.

And if we all wrote what we knew, there would be no vampire stories, no Little Mermaid, Captain Kirk wouldn’t have had what is basically a flip phone today…because they didn’t exist and the writer couldn’t have KNOWN them. It’s our imaginations that build a story.

So, write what you know…and write what you don’t.

About Tari Lynn Jewett

Tari Lynn Jewett lives off Route 66 with her husband of 37 years. They have three amazing sons, a board game designer, a sound engineer and a musician. For over fifteen years she wrote freelance for magazines and newspapers, wrote television commercials, radio spots, numerous press releases, and many, MANY PTA newsletters. As much as she loved writing those things, she always wanted to write fiction . . . and now she is.

She also believes in happily ever after . . . because she’s living hers.

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