vintar:

there’s a lot of people pushing back against “write what you know” as advice for aspiring authors and i would like to speak up in its defence for a moment because i just finished reading a mystery book where the murder weapon was a vicious fighting dog, and in the scene where it was finally revealed we found out that a) the person who had stolen it and was using it to kill people it had been keeping it secret from the police by locking it in his car boot, b) it was an irish wolfhound, c) once freed, it attacked the hardboiled detective across the yard instead of the gormless idiot who had been repeatedly stuffing it in a car boot, and d) its way of attacking the detective in this very dramatic finale was via mighty swipes of its sharp claws, which slashed through his skin like knives

i don’t think this author has seen a dog in his life. i think he might have confused them with lions? write what you know: if you’re writing an animal, be fairly confident that you could point to one in a small child’s pop-up book