How To Write, Part 8: What You Know

Writing is great. Writing based off stuff you know is even better, though.
This probably requires a bit of explanation and I should try and... yes. Okay, let's go back to the start and start at the... the start. Shut up, it's... it's really early in the morning, I'm not functioning yet and Luna's actually still in bed.
One common piece of advice from people - writers and not - is that you should write about what you know. This is true: if you know about something from researching into it or better yet, firsthoof experiences, you can  usually write about it a lot more effectively, whether it's good memories or bad memories that are associated with it. That doesn't mean that every story should be your autobiography, though, or that you have to strictly write about those things in that exact form. This is where things like exaggeration, hyperbole, and other similar stuff come in very useful: learning to put a microscopic event like, say... a badly-cooked meal that makes everyone sick on to a macroscopic scale, turning it into... a plague that has infected the world, etcetera, is important. Yes, those two things are very different from each other and will clearly have different results, but there's plenty of things you can take from your nauseous experience with that bad, undercooked food and exaggerate, expand upon, and use as a base. You've all experienced what it's like to feel sick, right? Think of how it was for you, personally: the swimming in your stomach, the prick of tears in your eyes, the feel of sweat and the smells. These are all senses that were affected in the micro- event that you can use to begin building the structure of the macro- event.
You can do this with almost anything... and more importantly, this is where experiences that have helped shape you, that have been.. difficult, or unfortunate, can be used for good instead of left to fester and be bad. And to be honest... it's healing, too, for a writer to do this. To take that poison, and turn it into fuel for the creative process. To use negative experiences, and use them to express the emotions and feelings of a character. To help get across to someone who hasn't experienced these things first-hoof the impact and trauma of these events, whether they're personal stories or exaggerations to a macroscopic scale... but words carry emotions very well. When we write, we infuse a little piece of ourselves into our work, and most people can feel that in one way or another: the ability to transmit those emotions through writing is what separates the truly skilled and gifted from the rest.
Use your experiences, good and bad, as bases for your writing. Just remember to always validate the experiences of others, too, and that everyone experiences things differently. And remember most of all that your goal as a writer isn't just to make people happy: it's to make people feel. But I'll get more into that next week when I'm more awake. I gotta get coffee running before Luna wakes up.

~Scrivener Blooms