How not to be a writer # 13: Literally only what you know

So, your day job is a software engineer? Great! Let's write a story about a man who goes to work and create the most amazing app for the smartphones. And the story would contain lines and lines of code from various stages of work in progress versions.

Nobody is going to read that,except in a computer science classroom.

Writing what you know means drawing from the life experience in your life. How do you eat? How do you express emotions? How do you live life? We put these experiences into stories ranging from the historical fiction to the high fantasy. None of which we could never experience but in our imagination.


So, don't write in a literal sense.