There’s a piece of writing advice that gets repeated so often it’s practically wallpaper: write what you know. I understood it for years the way most people do, write about your job, your hometown, your family. Useful, but a little flat. It wasn’t until I was deep into The Magical Dumligo that I realized the advice means something quite different, and far more useful, than that.
Writing what you know isn’t about writing about your life. It’s about writing from it.
I was born in South Africa, in small towns where the light seemed to fall differently over the veldt than anywhere else I’ve lived since: golden, low, endless. That light is in Far-Ago Island before a single reader ever notices it. The colors of the landscape, the sense of open, sun-warmed space, the feeling that something extraordinary could be hiding just past the next hill, that’s South Africa, transplanted into fantasy without ever naming itself as such.
Then there was England, where I lived for twelve years. English countryside has its own kind of magic: mist that seems to move with intention, woodlands with centuries of folklore layered into the soil, a sense that history is always just beneath your feet. Some of that atmosphere lives in the mysterious purple mist that first draws Billy and Annie through the archway into Far-Ago Island. It isn’t lifted from an English legend. It’s built from the feeling of walking through an English wood at dusk and being fairly certain, just for a second, that something was watching.
And now there’s Vancouver Island, Canada, where I live today. The serenity of this coastline, the particular quality of quiet you find near the water here, shapes the calmer moments of the book: the spaces between danger, where characters catch their breath and remember why they’re fighting.
None of this means I wrote a memoir dressed up as fantasy. Terominus the shapeshifting cyclops never lived on any farm I knew. The Dumligo isn’t based on a pet. But the emotional truth of each place I’ve called home is stitched into the fabric of Far-Ago Island, even where the facts are pure invention.
This is what I mean by writing what you know rather than about what you know. You don’t need to set your fantasy novel in your actual hometown, or make your protagonist a thinly veiled version of yourself, for your life to be present on the page. What you need is to have actually felt something: actual wonder in an actual landscape, actual fear in an actual mist, actual peace beside an actual shore, and then to let that feeling guide the details of a world that never existed anywhere but your imagination.
I think this is especially important advice for younger writers, who sometimes believe fantasy requires them to invent everything from nothing. It doesn’t. Every dragon has been someone’s real fear. Every enchanted forest has been someone’s real walk at dusk. The magic isn’t invented from a blank page, it’s translated from a real memory into an unreal shape.
Three continents, twelve years, one lifetime of paying attention- that’s what built Far-Ago Island. Not because I was writing about myself, but because I couldn’t have written it any other way.
So if you’re a writer wondering how to make your invented world feel real, my advice is simple: stop searching for the right facts to include, and start searching your memory for the right feelings instead. Where have you felt real wonder? Where have you felt watched by something you couldn’t name? Where have you felt entirely at peace? Put those feelings into your fantasy, and the world will feel lived-in even if it never existed at all.