Write What You Don’t Know: Crossing Boundaries in Fiction

If you went to therapy in 1940, you might have found yourself lying on a couch, facing away from your counselor, a remote authority figure referred to only as “doctor.” There would be no personal items in the office and absolutely no discussion of the therapist’s life outside of the treatment room.

(Writing Description in Fiction.)

If you went to therapy 30 years later, in 1970, you might have found yourself in an encounter group, the barriers between the therapist (with whom you were on a first name basis) and patient all but erased in favor of expressions of raw, immediate experience and open sharing of personal history by all parties.

Thirty years later, in 2000, I was a young graduate student and mental health science had converged on a happy medium, an understanding that boundaries are critical but that they can be overly rigid. That they should be respected but can also be interrogated.

What is true for therapists is also true for writers.

“Write what you know.” It sets a boundary, a directive to stay in one’s lane. It’s both directive and protective, a guide for tapping into your richest personal material and also for respecting forms and content beyond your education and experience. It can also be limiting.

My debut mystery novel, To the End of Reckoning, will be published this spring. It pushes boundaries on three fronts: boundaries between careers, artistic boundaries, and boundaries of identity.

First, there is the careerist boundary. In 2000 I was in graduate school for clinical psychology, not for creative writing. My last English class, in fact, was in 1994 when I was in the 12th grade (to be fair, it was an AP course). This is the professional boundary that echoes inside many of our heads as we move toward publication: “What qualification do I have to be called a writer?”

Are you an accountant? A helicopter pilot? A firefighter or an electrician or a barista at some coffee shop I’ve never heard of? You have every bit as much claim to the title of writer as the top graduate of the top MFA program in the country, provided you’ve done the work of getting in front of a blank page that you then filled with words. It’s not a licensed profession. No one is going to file a complaint with the state, the way they will if you call yourself a dentist or barber or mortician without the proper credential. This type of boundary invites transgression, and you should absolutely cross it without remorse.

The next type of boundary is artistic. My first two novels were contemporary coming of age stories. To the End of Reckoning marks a shift in genre, from Young Adult to mystery. Whatever a genre may be—a marketing device, a way of organizing bookstores, the expression of deep storytelling schema in our collective unconscious—it is a contract with the reader. It conveys that you will follow a particular storytelling form. These traditions deserve respect, but not reverence. If you have always written romance then there’s no reason you can’t shift into horror, so long as you understand something about the history and the audience. If Flea can record a jazz album, then you can shift genre too (just remember that he prepared at USC music school first).  

Then there is a third type of boundary, around identity. To the End of Reckoning follows Lukas and Richard Moore, a father and son unraveling a neighbor’s mysterious disappearance. Lukas, 23, has returned from New York City where he was on the cusp of long-sought success to care for Richard after his father’s traumatic brain injury. Now living with the long-term cognitive effects of TBI, Richard is a character with a disability I do not share.

“Write what you know.” Do I know what it means to have TBI? I wrote a doctoral dissertation on the topic and later published in the professional literature, and I’ve spent more than 20 years supporting patients with neuropsychological disabilities. I’ve dissected human brains in the lab and spent thousands of hours analyzing cognitive tests.

So, I know about TBI. But do I know it from within, the way someone knows it when they have been robbed of the faculties and abilities that allowed them to do their jobs? When their attention and memory and executive functioning have been altered in ways that make them wonder whether they still are who they were before the injury? Do I know it the way their partners and children, coping with the new logistics of day-to-day life and the profound questions of psychological identity, know it?

I’ll never know it the way one of the first TBI patients I worked with, a construction worker who plunged from a roof, knew it. He wasn’t able to go back to work and he sat in the clinic where I was an intern and reminisced about the days when he worked multiple jobs to care for his family, when he thought about maybe going to college, and he knew things that no amount of academic study or brain dissection or psychological testing are ever going to tell me.

Does that mean I shouldn’t write the character? Is his creation intrinsically exploitative? Not necessarily. Sometimes, writing is a way to know. To try and build a bridge, however imperfect, from knowing about to knowing from within. It brings us, writer and reader, across a boundary and into an experience. Those boundaries need to be crossed but crossed with care, with preparation, and with humility. If I insisted on only writing what I know from a first-person perspective—writing characters identical to myself in all aspects of lived experience—then those overly rigid boundaries would be artistically stifling. And if I was oblivious to those boundaries then I would open the door to an inauthentic, exploitative use of other people’s suffering. 

We now recognize that the classical analysts and the encounter group therapists were both wide of the mark. Boundaries need to be present, but they should not be uncompromisingly rigid. Too porous and you open the door to exploitation; too unyielding and you close the door to growth. The same is true for writers. So, when you come upon a boundary, ask yourself: Why does this line exist?

If it is to protect the turf of graduates from prestigious academic programs, then step right over.

If it is to guide writers and readers into historic storytelling traditions (and onto recognizable shelves in the bookstore), do your homework and then proceed.

And if it is there to guard against exploitation of a marginalized group then you need to do more than your homework: You need to encounter the authentic experiences of real people so that you can blend your research-based knowledge with humility about the things you will never fully know, and create the opportunity for your work to become a vehicle of greater knowing for both you and for your readers.

Write what you know but understand that if you keep writing, and keep reading, and do it with curiosity and humility, then this is a guide rather than a limit because you can always know more.

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