"Only write what you know"

In high school, I was told to only write what I know.  I guess this was another way of saying "only write what is real."  I always found this annoying but also believed that it was true, and I repeated it often.  It was annoying because my childhood turned out to be boring compared to the childhoods of my peers.  The sole tragedy in my life was when we had to put the dog to sleep.  Everyone else had divorced parents or an eating disorder or murdered fathers.  They might have had better source material, but I had a grandfather whose motto was "never let the truth get in the way of a good story."  So, instead of writing about taking the dog to the vet and petting its head while the vet injected it with drugs, I wrote about how my father ran over the dog and how much I hated him for it.  I killed a lot of animals in stories during high school, because I knew what it was like for an animal to die, and people seemed to like those stories.

By the time I got to college, people started saying "write what you don't know."  Someone once described this to me as being a hunter instead of a Kamikaze pilot.  Writers who pull solely from their own experience will eventually run out of things to write about or will write about the same things over and over.  On the other hand, writers who research and write about things that they don't know about will have an abundance of writing material.  I'm not sure if this is true, but it has stuck with me over the years.

Over the past year, I have been writing about neither what I know nor what I don't know.  I have been writing about what I never want to know.  My characters are in situations I never want to be in, they say things I never want to say, they make decisions I never want to make.  I don't do this knowingly; I only realized it when reading over what I've written.  With fear, there is always something at stake, and there always has to be something at stake for your characters.  At least that's what I've been told.