There is No Shame in Writing What You Know by Leigh Radford

It took me until I was forty to start writing seriously. As daft as it sounds, I didn’t believe I had anything worth writing about before then, or at least nothing meaningful enough to ask someone else to spend their valuable time reading. It was a confidence thing, but I let it stymie my passion for storytelling for years.

I had an epiphany when I lost my Dad in 2020. I saw how much time I’d wasted and how no one was stopping me from writing, only me and my fears. My love for him and the gruelling times we endured trying to keep him alive for as long as possible gave me the idea for what became my debut novel, One Yellow Eye.

I never doubted that writing a story inspired by my experiences of nursing him was the right thing to do. I lived with Dad for six months to help manage his care and that time changed me profoundly. It gave me an unshakable conviction that I had something worthwhile to say about terminal illness and death, something that might resonate with others. I had lived and breathed my subject matter, felt all of the emotions at the heart of Kesta’s battle to save her husband from the zombie virus he’s infected with myself: stress, guilt, desperation and frequently an overwhelming rage. It gave me insight, an authentic emotional foundation on which to build the rest of the story, and with which readers could hopefully relate.

The tip of writing what you know can be empowering, primarily because it allows an insecure author to root their story in something honest. You don’t know if you can write a novel, you don’t know if anyone will enjoy reading it. But you do know, inside out, what’s at the heart of it - perhaps it’s a relationship breakdown, a personal trauma, even an unusual industry that your protagonist works in - and that truth speaks volumes to the reader.

I knew grief because I had lived it, it’s part of who I am. I had to write about it, to share a message about the brutal realities of losing a loved one and how isolating complex grief can be. Hearing from readers who’ve told me the novel validated their feelings of anger and devastation has been humbling. A long-lost friend from school even reached out to say she’d heard about my novel shortly after her own father’s funeral and that reading it reassured her that everything she was going through was okay, and she would survive it. How special is that?

Not losing faith in what you’re writing is one of the biggest challenges for a writer. Writing what you know can give you a voice, and something to say. If writing a novel is like struggling alone through a dark tunnel, then writing something you know about intimately is the light at the very end of it, the purpose that keeps you going.