Wolfe insists that writers replace the hoary old saw “write what you know” with “write about what you find,” since in fact few people know much of anything until and unless they go out and learn it. His advice — or better, exhortation, was: leave the house, gather information, and apply reportorial techniques to fiction; i.e. invent stories that explain the real world. Don’t think of fiction as fantasy; far from it. The whole enterprise stands or falls based on your story’s plausibility, which is to say, its conformity to observed reality. Bonfire of the Vanities was so successful because everyone who knows anything about New York knew that the portrait was dead-on accurate.
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