Tried the "write what you know" advice for a flash fiction prompt at a workshop

I was sitting in a library in Portland last Tuesday when I tried writing a scene from my boring office job for a creative writing prompt. The story came out flat as a pancake and nobody in the group could find any tension in it. How do you turn real life moments into something that actually hooks readers without just making stuff up?

2 comments

2 Comments

lucas15921h ago

Wait, isn't "write what you know" more about the emotional truth of the moment, not the literal facts?

betty_ward14h ago

Yeah, but that's the thing - people get so hung up on the literal details they miss the point entirely. It's like when someone says "write what you know" and suddenly every story has to be about the author's actual life. I see this same pattern everywhere, not just in writing. Like how people learn to cook a specific dish and then can't adapt when an ingredient is missing. Or how someone learns a skill at work but can't apply it to a slightly different situation. They focus on the surface stuff and forget the actual lesson underneath. It's like memorizing the map instead of knowing how to read the landmarks.