Brain Droppings on Writing

I've been doing some editing for one of my favorite people in the whole world, and all this thinking about writing has gotten me thinking about, well, writing. People always say, "Write what you know." I thought about it. I thought about all the things I know, and I decided that nobody would be particularly interested if I wrote a Faulkneresque novel about my personal feelings regarding which way the toilet paper roll should go on the holder. Nobody actually gives a shit that my cat eats leaves off the living room floor when I track them in from the patio. I know that 2+2=4, but that's hardly worthy of long-winded commentary. What I know isn't all that fascinating. Then I thought about it some more. What DO I know anyway? In the grand scheme of things, I don't have the answers to any of the important questions. Most of the time, I don't even know what the important questions are. Overall, I don't know shit. I don't know the meaning of life, why we're all here, what our purpose is, where I'll be in twenty years, or where my car keys are. I don't know how successful people succeed or why failures fail, and I don't know how to achieve world peace, cure AIDS, or create matter. So then, what does it matter? How does anything anyone says (or writes) actually matter if one only writes what they know? So that cancels that. The opposite of writing what you know, then, would be to write what you don't know. Now you're in trouble. Think of how many times a book has been written or a movie made where it was obvious that the writer didn't actually know ANYTHING about what he or she was writing about. Isn't the first thing that most people say something along the lines of, "That was shit. He didn't know what the hell he was talking about!" It's kind of difficult to write about what you don't know. If you're going to write about what you don't know, then you'd probably have to learn something about it first in order to do so somewhat decently. Of course, once you know something about it, then you're writing what you know again, and we've already covered how that winds up being an epic blah. It is my conclusion that "Write what you know" is categorically, empirically, undeniably 100% horse shit. Don't write what you know; write what you feel. Write what impassions you. Write what you absolutely can't NOT write. This is what I know. But as I already said, what do I know?