In songwriting, there’s a piece of writing advice that gets repeated so often it’s practically become canon. You’ve probably heard it a hundred times, maybe even had it handed to you early in your songwriting life as though it were gospel:
Write what you know.
On the surface it sounds reasonable. Sensible, even. Draw from your own experience, stay authentic, don’t pretend to be something you’re not. Fair enough.
But author Annie Proulx has a different take. She calls it “the most tiresome and stupid advice that could possibly be given.”
Her argument against the advice is that if we only ever write about what we already know, we never grow. We don’t develop an interest in others, we don’t push ourselves toward new experiences, we don’t expand. In her words, “we just coil tighter and tighter into our boring little selves.”
Now, that’s a confronting thing to hear. But for songwriters, it might be the most useful thing anyone ever says to you.
Because the real question isn’t what do you know? It’s what don’t you know yet and what are you going to do about that?
The Problem With Writing Only What You Know
Here’s what happens when a songwriter stays exclusively inside their own experience.
At first, it works. Your early songs are often your most raw and honest precisely because you’re writing from something real and immediate. First heartbreak, family tension, the town you grew up in, the job you hated. That material is right there, close to the surface, and it comes out with a kind of urgency that listeners respond to.
But then what?
You keep writing. You process the same emotional material. You get better technically, your chord choices improve, your melodies get more interesting, your lyrics sharpen. But over time something starts to flatten out.
The songs start to sound like each other. The themes loop. You find yourself writing the same song you wrote two years ago, just with different words.
This is the hermetic songwriter trap. You’ve built a very tidy, well-organised creative space, and you never leave it. From the outside, you might look productive. But there’s a ceiling, and you’ve hit it.
Listeners feel this, even when they can’t articulate it. There’s a difference between a song that comes from genuine depth and one that comes from a writer going through familiar motions. You can’t always put your finger on it, but it’s there.
There’s a lack of new material going into the well.
What Proulx Is Actually Saying
Proulx isn’t just complaining about bad advice. She’s pointing toward something specific.
She’s saying that curiosity is a more reliable creative engine than biography. That the question worth asking isn’t “what have I been through?” but “what genuinely interests me right now?”
Even if you haven’t lived it, don’t fully understand it or even if it’s unfamiliar territory.
That mind-shift shift changes everything because curiosity doesn’t run dry the way personal experience does. There’s always something you don’t know yet, always something pulling at you, always a question you haven’t answered.
Think about what this looks like in practice. Bob Dylan wasn’t a Depression-era drifter or a civil war soldier, but he wrote about those worlds with conviction because he was genuinely obsessed with them.
Bruce Springsteen built entire working-class characters from careful observation and empathy, not always from direct personal experience.
Paul Simon got on a plane to South Africa because the music pulled at him, and Graceland came out of following that pull toward something completely unfamiliar.
None of those songs would exist if those writers had stayed inside the boundaries of what they personally knew.
The instruction isn’t pretend you’ve lived things you haven’t. It’s follow what genuinely interests you, and then go find out. Write what you don’t know yet (with the emphasis on the word yet).
Saying Yes… What That Actually Looks Like
Now, before you book a flight to the other side of the world, it’s worth saying that living a bigger life doesn’t have to mean dramatic upheaval.
Yes, travel is great. New countries, unfamiliar cultures, being somewhere you don’t speak the language and have to pay attention in a completely different way, all of that is good material. But the yeses that build a songwriter’s palette come in all sizes.
Sometimes it’s a small yes. Staying at the party an hour longer than you normally would and ending up in a conversation that changes something in you. Reading the book that challenges your worldview instead of the one that confirms it. Taking a different route home. Visiting the part of your own city you’ve never spent time in. Sitting with grief instead of immediately trying to process it away.
Sometimes it’s a bigger yes. The job offer that scares you. The relationship that asks more of you than you’re used to giving. The trip with no real plan. Spending time in a community that lives nothing like yours. Saying yes to the thing your instinct is to decline because it feels uncomfortable or unfamiliar.
All of these experiences go into the well for use later.
The songwriter who schedules experiences the way they schedule writing sessions is building something that can’t be built any other way. You are, quite literally, expanding the palette you have to paint with.
The Well. Your Creative Reserve
Who you are right now is the sum total of all the choices you’ve made and the experiences you’ve participated in so think of everything you’ve lived, observed, felt, and absorbed as a well you draw from every time you sit down to write.
Early in a songwriter’s life, that well gets filled fast. Everything is new, everything is intense, everything leaves a mark. But without new experiences going in, the well starts to drop. You keep drawing from it without replenishing it, and eventually you’re scraping the bottom.
This is why some artists make two or three remarkable records and then seem to run out of things to say. It’s not that they stopped caring or stopped working. It’s that they stopped living in a way that kept the well full.
There’s a useful distinction here between describing a storm from a photograph versus having actually been caught in one. Both writers might use the same words but one of them knows what it feels like when the wind changes direction and the temperature drops suddenly and your clothes are soaking through.
That sensory, physical, emotional memory doesn’t just inform the specific song about the storm. It informs everything. It’s in the texture of the writing in ways that are hard to trace but impossible to fake.
You can’t manufacture depth at the desk. You have to go out and earn it first.
Empathy: The Hidden Dividend
Here’s something that doesn’t get talked about enough in songwriting circles.
When you say yes to a wider range of experiences, especially experiences that put you in contact with people and lives very different from your own, you build empathy. And empathy might be the single most important tool a songwriter has.
This is what separates a song that’s purely autobiographical from a song that feels universal. When a listener hears a song and thinks this was written for me, that’s not an accident. That’s the songwriter’s ability to step outside their own perspective and imagine, with real accuracy and feeling, what it’s like to be someone else.
That capacity doesn’t come from sitting alone in a room. It comes from having genuinely engaged with the world. From having talked to people whose lives look nothing like yours. From having been in situations that required you to understand a perspective you didn’t start with. From having lived enough to know that your experience is just one of an enormous number of possible human experiences.
The songs that endure are almost always the ones with that quality. They feel personal and universal at the same time. They feel like the writer really knew something, not just about themselves, but about what it means to be a person.
That knowing is built outside the studio.
Some Practical Takeaways
So what does this actually look like as a working songwriter?
Start by doing an honest audit of your current life. Are you expanding or contracting? Are you saying yes to new things, or have you settled into a comfortable, predictable routine that rarely puts you in contact with anything unfamiliar?
There’s no judgment in that question, just useful information.
Then ask yourself: what am I genuinely obsessed with right now that I haven’t written about? Not what have I been through, but what is pulling at me, interesting me, keeping me curious? That’s where your next batch of songs might actually live.
Think about scheduling experiences the way you schedule writing sessions. Block out time not to write, but to go and live. Visit somewhere you’ve never been. Have a conversation with someone outside your usual circle. Read something outside your genre, your comfort zone, your usual worldview.
And follow the pull. When something interests you, a story you read, a place you keep thinking about, a question you can’t resolve, don’t file it away. Go after it.
Do the reading, make the trip, have the conversation. Write what you don’t know yet by going out and finding out.
In Conclusion
None of this is an argument against craft. Learning your instrument, understanding song structure, developing your ear, building your technical ability, all of that still matters enormously.
But Proulx’s challenge is a reminder that craft without a life behind it only goes so far. The desk will always be there. The experiences won’t wait.
Just think… The best song you’ll ever write might depend entirely on something you haven’t done yet. Some conversation you haven’t had, some place you haven’t been, some yes you haven’t said.
So close the notebook for a while. Go find out what you don’t know yet.
Your songs will be better for it.
