Pro tip: the English teacher who kept saying 'write what you know' was half right and half dead wrong

Quinn Robinson · 2026-10-17T18:05:04.189755+00:00

Mrs. Delgado hammered 'write what you know' into us every single day in 11th grade, and for years I believed it. So when I tried my hand at short stories last winter, I set every one in places I'd lived, and after 6 drafts each one died by paragraph three. What finally worked was flipping it: I kept the feelings I knew and made up everything else, and my first decent piece came out of a story set on a made-up moon colony. I think the real rule is write what you feel, not what you've seen, and nobody ever puts it that way. Mrs. Delgado was a good teacher, but that one line cost me about 4 months of bad drafts. Has a prompt or a teacher ever sent you down a wrong path like that?

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Pro tip: the English teacher who kept saying 'write what you know' was half right and half dead wrong | Creative Writing Prompts - Librear