I ride horses... and I know things. Katherine Roberts

'Write about what you know' is still common advice for beginning authors. When I heard that way back in my pre-publication days, my first thought was: 'well, that's going to make a boring book!' I was still in my 20s at the time and actually knew very little, so I plunged headfirst into the fantasy and science fiction genre, deliberately writing about what I didn't know (and really couldn't be expected to know much about) since I was inventing entire worlds and travelling to distant planets. Much easier, and less chance of getting found out with some glaring error that would make wiser readers who did know laugh behind my back... or, more likely these days, in a scathing online review.

Or so I thought.

I soon discovered inventing fantasy worlds is just as difficult as learning about our existing world, since even magic needs some rules otherwise the whole plot just collapses. All the same, it was rather fun creating them. After experimenting with short genre fiction for a while, I settled on a fantasy quest for my first novel Song Quest (1999). Only now, 30 years on from its heady publication day as my debut book, do I find myself wondering if I was in fact writing about what I knew best at the time. After all, I grew up in Devon and Cornwall exploring beaches and hunting strange creatures in rock pools. A mere hop of imagination created mermaids singing up a storm to wreck the ship that is hunting them for their eggs, which became the opening of Song Quest and led to an entire trilogy.  Learning to fly a glider while at university created my half-boy, half-bird hero of the third book in the trilogy Dark Quetzal, enabling me to write realistic flying scenes from his point of view. And of course on most fantasy quests the characters travel on horseback, drawing on my childhood passion for ponies... along with all the blistered backsides and unscheduled tumbles. 

Later in my writing career, I moved on to fully fledged horse books, drawing on my experience of working in horse racing to write an epic novel 'I am the Great Horse' from the point of view of Alexander the Great's famous stallion Bucephalas. It's my longest book to date at 150,000 words so fell awkwardly between pony books for younger readers and horse-themed books for older readers, but it has since found its own fan base across all generations of horse lovers and remains my most popular book. If you haven't read it yet, or know a horse person age 10+, the Kindle edition is currently on Easter special offer for only 99p.

I am the Great Horse
* special offer only 99p for Kindle*

Sometimes even things you don't know very much about can give a realistic twist to your writing. For the first book in my Seven Fabulous Wonders series The Great Pyramid Robbery, I translated my observation of large, dusty building sites back through 4,000 years to create a realistic atmosphere for building an Egyptian pyramid by removing the machines, adding (a lot) more manpower, and keeping the down-to-earth language and jokes that builders tend to use on site. Then I threw my reluctant young hero into a work gang on the pyramid site and let him take over the story. It probably helps that even the experts are not sure exactly how they built the pyramids without the aid of 21st century machines, but so far nobody has told me I've got it all wrong!

So maybe what you know is not that boring, after all. You just need a little spin or short hop of imagination to turn all that ordinary stuff into a story that someone else would love to read :-)

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Katherine Roberts writes fantasy and historical fiction for young (and older) readers. 

Find out more at www.katherineroberts.co.uk