What Do I Really Know? Journal 1

Journal # 1“Write what you know”The first rule of writing is to “Write What You Know.” What do you know? What are the experiences, settings, topics, issues, genres, themes and characters that you feel you can comfortably write about?What are the experiences, settings, topics, issues, genres, themes and characters that you are interested in enough to research in order to write about them more effectively?What are your limitations? In other words, what topics do you feel unknowledgeable about and think you should avoid?



Write what I know... Simple enough task. But in all honesty, what do I know?

It is not so much, that I write what I know, but I write what I think I know- Or maybe just what I feel. If I have an idea, I write about it, whether it just be a character sketch, an idea for a setting, even a bit of dialogue that I think would go great in a story. Sometimes I find myself writing an entire prologue to a story, that I haven't even fully thought of or explored mentally.
I enjoy writing about a character that I can relate with, or a character that I know I'd hate out of prose.
But being an aspiring screen writer, dialogue is what I enjoy writing the most and have no problem researching everything from format, to how many pages, to the static and dynamic characters I should, and want to place in the play. Not so much research as check the internet, but just dwell in the deepest parts of my mind, and find what really makes my characters tick. Asking myself 'Why are they like that', not just simply saying 'They are like that.'

I'm not quite sure, where my limits are as a writer, because I have never tried to push past them- but I think as I get deeper into the course, I will find myself in dispositions where I *Must* push past my limits, are at least venture further than I'd normally like too... I am a writer, that takes serious situations and puts a comic spin on them- even to the point of it just being twisted; But I am comfortable with that.

I think, what I am least comfortable with- or maybe I am just a foriegner to it; would be holding onto one idea and sticking with it. I often stop what I'm writing to write something different instead of perhaps making that new idea, a part of the *current* project. It's sort of like- to use an analogy- that I look at a branch, and instead of looking at the rest of the tree, that I assume that, that one branch *is* the tree. And I move on bored, instead of taking the time to explore the entire picture, instead of that one puzzle piece.

One topic, I know I am not going to do well with would be non-fiction. I have tried and it just seems to bland. Perhaps because I know it has already been writen (history) and I am afraid to put my own spin on it- feeling I could perhaps weaken the actual topic. Maybe?
I'm not too sure, what I mean but I know I am extremely uncomfortable with writing anything Non-fiction. So I would be more than happy to avoid it.