BUT WHAT DO I KNOW?

Mark Twain said, “Write what you know.” What he left out is the certainty that what I know today is different from what I knew yesterday. Some immutable facts have shown themselves to be sheer fiction or fakery, while there also must be new additions to the knowledge repository. Both of those are necessary to human growth.

The scope of my knowledge changes and, hopefully, increases all the time, whether by intent, as in doing research for a book, or through life’s lessons of that no one can predict or plan. It changes the limits of what one “can write” immensely.

The box you put yourself in, whether as a writer or as a human, is usually of your own making. You don’t have to blow it all up to be able to realign the walls and ceiling from time to time. Writing is almost always an evolutionary process: one fact, one lesson, one word, one step at a time.

There’s another quote I love, especially when applied to the writing perspective . It’s often associated with Bobby Kennedy, JFK’s brother. But the original source is another author/playwright, George Bernard Shaw—aren’t we a clever bunch? Here it is: “Some men see things as they are and say why, I dream things that never were and say, why not?”