I think what is vital is that you are curious about the way the world works. As long as you keep learning you will have more to write about. Keep reading the greats of literature.
Since writers have access to the internet or a library, they can do a lot of research on whatever topic they wish to write about. For example, I could write a story about WWII without having actually experienced it. There are plenty of personal accounts and details out there that I could base my story on. So my advice to you would be to learn to become a good researcher. In the case of relationships, there are many TV shows and movies you can draw inspiration from.
I'm not afraid to use other people either, I know that is unpopular here but quite frankly without the input of teen readers there is no way I'd have produced a book from the POV of a seventeen year old boy. Thanks to help from my gay readers my gay character is starting to be more sensitively handled. My husband helped me write the part about grief.
From my experience, when I write something that I have experienced in life, it comes across as honest and sincere to the readers which are a must for a fiction work to be successful imo. On the other hand when I write something that I hadn't experienced, it tends to be cheesy and unreal.... luckily I am aware of it so I observe, listen and research, and use them to develop a char with all honesty. Other than these two, there is a third thing I would like to share. Sometimes when I observe, intentionally or unintentionally, on electronic mediums or in real life, a small incident or even a flicker of an emotion shown by somebody can provide me with train of thoughts (mostly assumptions) which I can develop into a story. Like for example some years ago, I visited Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) for the first time and I saw this girl child (about 8 years old) in rags with a begging bowl, she gave me the most incredible smile as the car I was on pass by. I kept thinking about her and about the her life. I thought of the world from her perspective and soon I was having enough material to write a short story, and wrote a pretty convincing one even though I have never experienced poverty nor do I know anybody who is that poor. So, if something stirs your emotions, you may be able to create a world you have never known (pretty much only by your imaginations) to bring out those emotions. But those are rare occasions and I am more comfortable writing only the world I know. Usually, what I do is I 'collect' whatever I can through observations and listening, and plant them in the world I know or rather use them when I write stories about the world I know. P.S. I don't know if I am making any sense at all lol
Unpopular? I'm not sure why, if you are only talking about using them for research. Modelling characters after real people, on the other hand, is like dancing drunk in a minefield. No matter how enthusiastic they may be about the idea, you stand a good chance of getting sued later.
I've never taken this saying to mean.... ' I must write about the life of sprirj to the word'. Its just never happens. I truely believe in the saying 'Write what you know' yet I'm writing a fiction about a killer in the 27th century. You can say I know nothing of this, but it is not about the setting, the statement must be used in the dialogue, the detail. The key is to find a way to relate to your subject, make it approachable and believeable to the reader. I think this is the true meaning to 'Write what you know'. Because if you can understand the depths of what you write, so will your reader.
I'd just like to add that everyone deals with things differently and a message found in many 'how to write books' says to be surprising yet convincing. The experience worth writing about is not necessarily what you've done or what you've been through but the depth of what you've noticed in the lives of those around you and your emotional response. yes life experience plays a big part. There is a couple we know who are loaded with money. I mean, they have so much money, they don't know what to do with it because the wife was born into a wealthy family. For Christmas last year she purchased a $40k fishing boat for her husband. My husband was drooling at the mouth. I gave him a photo frame of our Son with his handprints. My point is, although I don't think my friends are shallow, they most certainly don't know what it's like to struggle or what it's like to make the dollar stretch further and further every week and quite frankly, I wouldn't want to hear it if she tried. Every Christmas they need to spend more and more because it seems, in all their money, they've lost the ability to value the things in life that are free. I love this quote from Aldous Huxley: Experience is not a matter of having actually swum the Hellespont or dance with the dervishes, it is a matter of sensibility and intuition, of seeing and hearing the significant things, of paying attention to the right moments, of understanding and coordinating. Experience is not what happens to a man but what man does with what happens to him.
