In response to sage advice

I believe it was Mark Twain who said, “Write what you know.” I men­tioned this notion to my sis­ter writer who quot­ed back to me (not know­ing know the source), “That should leave you with a lot of free time.”

At the moment that’s mean­ing­ful because I am start­ing a new book about a sub­ject about which I know some­thing, but not a great deal. Or, I should say, what I do know about the sub­ject is based only on per­son­al expe­ri­ence. That’s not enough. What I am doing, there­fore, is inter­view­ing peo­ple in the know—a lot of them—about the sub­ject. The point is, I don’t just gath­er the infor­ma­tion for which I am look­ing, the peo­ple I interview—knowing that I am a writer—start telling me sto­ries. That in turn alters the sto­ry I am going to write, adding twists, turns, and might I add, real­i­ty. Most of all it adds depth, because these sto­ries force me to look at my sub­ject in a new way, to know some­thing beyond writ­ing what I know.

That should use up a lot of my free time.