Write Where You Know

Write Where You Know By: Kev Harrison Writing advice is as common as it is varied. But one nugget which seems to have stood the test of time, is to ‘write what you know.’ There’s been constant debate over what this really means for your fiction. In this article, I’m going to recommend a slight twist on this. Write where you know.  As with all writing advice, it’s important to know that your mileage may vary. But this is something which has worked for me, and might do for you, too. A sense of place When my debut novella, The Balance, dropped in 2020, I was incredibly nervous. But, as the book began to find its audience, one element which came to the fore in many of the good reviews it received was the location. Readers felt grounded in the setting. They felt the chill of the snow, the closeness and isolation of the dense forest. And this was no accident.  In 2011, I moved to Poland, where I lived in a small city with medieval origins called Torun, in the north of the country. Because it was such a small place, and perhaps because of that sense of everything being new to me, I got out into the wilderness quite quickly. Coming from the south of England originally, I hadn’t seen much in the way of truly wintry weather. But, after three months living in Poland, we experienced one of the coldest winters in around twenty years. Temperatures dropped to thiry-six degrees below freezing in Centigrade (around minus thirty-three in Fahrenheit), and suddenly the forests that surrounded my city were silent, white landscapes, waiting to be explored. Even though The Balance was set in a different region of the country, writing the forest in which the book’s own Baba...
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