Reader Response to "Why Do You Write?"

When Margaret Atwood says that we write what we know, I think basically two things at once, and those things are "cool, that's definitely true" and "dear god why does it have to be so." This is due in large part to the fact that there are an overwhelmingly enormous amount of things that I do not know and a teeny tiny little pool of things that I actually do know. This is made even more certain by the constant re-occurrence of themes that always seem to weasel their way into my writing. Oh, there's wanderlust again, oh there's an absent father figure, oh there's a first heartbreak. And also there's usually a cat. Seriously, someone give me a dollar for every time I put a cat in one of my stories and I will be able to buy myself a full tank of gas.

A lot of the time, though, I will suddenly be struck by a really cool idea about some thing I do not know the first thing about, like underwater sea explorations or being stranded on a desert island and having to survive or how to properly tie a balloon (I have never been able to do this. Someone help.) But then I get really sad because I realize it's going to be super hard to write about any of these things, because I have not actually done them, and we write what we know. It's possible, of course, to write about things that we haven't experienced, but it just seems like a much more daunting task. If I was trying to write a story about surviving on a desert island I feel like I would probably get it all messed up because my character would probably eat poison berries that I didn't know were poisonous and then then the accuracy of the entire story would be discredited. 

So then I just make up a fantasy world where anything can happen and viola, the situation is more or less fixed. I have definitely written a lot of stories that required research or even just veered away from a story-line all together because I was afraid I wouldn't do it justice. Or I just keep writing about cats.