Welcome to part three of our Writer Chats series, which comes from Harriet of New Zealand. Harriet is a a student who shares our interests in food and writing and blogs about them at her site, Food Love Food. In her below post, she looks at the classic advice to “write what you know” and what that’s meant for her.

As a young girl my favourite movie was Harriet the Spy. When you are 10, having your name in the title of a movie is exciting, and so perhaps this is why I watched the film over and over. But I think I recognised much more than my own name—I recognised the intense desire to observe the world and to write down what you see.

I haven’t seen the movie in years; I don’t think I could bear to see it now. What I remember is possibly inaccurate and clouded by my childish understanding of the world, but I envied all that Harriet had to write about. There was tension in Harriet’s life, an internal and external struggle that my writing professors challenge us to strive for.

I wanted a world so diverse and interesting it would fill pages and pages of my notebook. Instead I grew up in a cul-de-sac in suburban, semi-rural New Zealand. My childhood was wonderfully simple, and so my notebooks from this time are filled with the digits of car number plates and the comings and goings of our elderly neighbours observed from the branches of the oak tree in my front yard. I remember Harriet’s wise and caring nanny telling her to write what she knew, that’s all anyone can do, and at the tender age of 10, the local swimming pool and the streets of my neighbourhood were, indeed, all that I knew.

Now, over 10 years later I keep this in mind whenever I begin a writing assignment: Write what you know. I think now that I’m older, now that I want more from the world than simply to eat tomato sandwiches everyday like Harriet the Spy, I strive to write what I want to know, what I want to learn about myself and the world around me.

When I write, I hope to enter at one place and exit at another—there needs to be a change of some sort. I don’t mean high intensity, life-shattering drama, although for some genres this works well. I’m after the subtle shifts, the small realisations that make you sit back and think, yes, that’s it.

Editor’s Note: Special thanks to Harriet for contributing this personal, thought-provoking post! If reading her story gets your own wheels turning about the nature of writing and creative work, let us know. Submissions are being accepted at WritingSeries [at] FoodLovesWriting [dot] com.