Write about what you don't know.

I know! Because he wrote about our encounter with those hostile aliens as through they were neighbors pissed off because Herbert's dog always barked in the middle of the night and because Herbert never picked up his newspapers from the lawn. But Herbert never met a Martian. (Not that I was there when he wrote War of the Worlds in 1898, but I'm almost certain.)

"Then, how did he write it then? Cuz that would be writing what you don't know."

Yep. That's what it is. And that make our job [writing] so damned cool.

Writers are naturally a curious bunch, always reading and wondering and imagining things. And if we only wrote about the stuff we knew about first-hand, then there would be a glut of stories involving Uniball pens, The World of Warcraft, The Writer's Journey and recaps of the final season of "The Wire."

When I wrote A Quiet Storm, I had not experienced bipolar disorder in my personal life, nor did I know anything about losing a husband to the Pacific like Nicole does in The View from Here. I've never painted a room purple one day only to paint it orange four days later. And I've never had an affair, and therefore, never lived with that type of guilt. I've popped Valium twice in my life (after Lasik surgery) but never enough of anything to start seeing the dead.

"How did you write about all that, then?" you ask.