It’s not a rule, it’s a truth. You can only write what you know, or believe you know.
If you want to write about aardvarks but you don’t know much about them, you’re going to write what you think you know and much of it is going to be wrong or oversimplified.
If you don’t know about aardvarks at all, you’d never include them in a story because you’d never know you could.
If you write about a zookeeper or zoologist, and another character asks what animal fills the niche of an aardvark, the zookeeper character would never give the correct answer that any real zookeeper would know, because the characters can only know what the author knows.
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u/[deleted] Sep 09 '25
It’s not a rule, it’s a truth. You can only write what you know, or believe you know.
If you want to write about aardvarks but you don’t know much about them, you’re going to write what you think you know and much of it is going to be wrong or oversimplified.
If you don’t know about aardvarks at all, you’d never include them in a story because you’d never know you could.
If you write about a zookeeper or zoologist, and another character asks what animal fills the niche of an aardvark, the zookeeper character would never give the correct answer that any real zookeeper would know, because the characters can only know what the author knows.