Not Writing What You Know

Tom Perrotta, who makes two appearances in Albany today, dispenses some free advice on the "big think" website:

Question: Should you always write what you know?

Perrotta: I’m always wary of any kind of generalization like that. There’re some people who… I think somebody once said there are two kinds of writers, you know, that there’s somebody who lives home and somebody who stays home, and I’ve always been the kind of writer who stayed home but I don’t necessarily feel like that’s going to work for everybody. I think you have to do a lot of reading and you have to do a lot of writing and if you’re lucky you’ll eventually find a voice or find a subject matter that you’re passionate about. I mean that to me is really the crucial thing, it’s somehow, you know, having your work connect with your obsessions and your passions and, you know, it’s… if you teach writing, sometimes it’s just very mysterious because you’ll see somebody, you can see that they have talent, you can see that they want very much to write but somehow there’s a kind of psychological disjunction between the work and what really matters to them and it’s scary, you know, when your work starts to interact with the unruly parts of your subconscious..... More.