During my half-an-hour departure, I talked to a former writing student of mine this spring. She is quite talented and wants to know what to do because she really enjoys writing. She is eager to learn.

We talked on the telephone about a story of hers that did not go well and talked about what went wrong with it. I told her that she was writing too far away from her own experience and that in this stage in her writing, she has only been writing for little more than a year, she should stay a little closer to the things that she knows until she has the technical tools to make a bridge, a longer bridge, away from her own life.

In other words, I told her to write about the things she knows about.

There would be plenty of time to write about what she doesn't know about.