Write what you don’t know
You might have heard the advice to writers to “write what you know.” You’ll find many articles explaining that you don’t want to do that.
Mark Twain is usually credited/blamed for first espousing the “write what you know” rule, although it actually may predate him. Hemingway modified the quote slightly, saying “Write what you know about.”
Japanese-British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro said, “‘Write about what you know’ is the most stupid thing I’ve heard. It’s the reverse of firing the imagination and potential of writers.”
On some level—both writers and readers—we are all alike. We all love, hurt, and hate, although likely for different reasons (former President George H. W. Bush famously hated broccoli.) But, what if your former spouse has never been accused of killing someone (or maybe you’re not married at all)? How can you write about a homicidal wife/husband? What if you’ve never been a lawyer, a police officer, a Harvard symbologist, been abandoned on Mars, or been a “Genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist”?
How can you write what you know about deep ocean mining if you’ve never done it?
While Kirkhouse Publishers wrote on their website that “Readers may find it easier to immerse themselves in a story or relate to your perspective when they sense you have first-hand experience,” Twain’s quote shouldn’t be taken literally. You don’t have to have been a doctor to write an effective doctor character. Or a deep ocean miner.
As Ryan Doskocil explained on Medium, “I have it on good authority that J.R.R. Tolkien never actually met a hobbit or visited Middle Earth, yet he was quite adept at writing about them. Also, Michael Crichton didn’t actually clone dinosaur DNA and set the creatures loose on a park full of screaming scientists…”
On the Chicago Writers Association blog, CWA VP Samantha Hoffman asked “What if J.K Rowling’s story about an orphaned son of two powerful wizards… [became a story about] an only child of farmers in Iowa? Ms. Hoffman suggested that writers should explore—and write about—what they DON’T know.
How? Research!
Not long ago you needed to spend time in a library to research. Now you can just use a search engine, even on your phone.While editing a draft of her novel God on Mayhem Street,Kristin Oakley decided to list her Google searches for a single day. They included:
How to speak with an Italian accent
Synonym for cannoli
List of American literary awards
What do morphine lollipops look like
1985-1986 US Network TV Schedule
Made for TV movies in January, 1986; the movie “Murrow”
Top slang terms of the 1980s
Early morning, age-appropriate farm chores
My first novel “Panda Bears From Mars” is loosely based on what I know about science fiction authors at SF conventions, but it also includes details on alien spacecraft and panda-like aliens, both of which I made up out of whole cloth.
Could pandas be the descendants of crash-landed aliens in early China who need cyanide to survive? (Giant pandas are only foundin China—even in the limited historical record. Also, I discovered that bamboo shoots also contain small amount of a cyanogenic compound called taxiphyllin.)
What might happen if the stranded aliens can’t get enough cyanide in their diet? Well, they might forget they were sapient, eventually devolving into the pandas we think are just cute animals.
Maybe that’s why there are so few of them and why there is no direct historical lineage of the species. Look up giant pandas on Wikipedia and you’ll find that “The giant panda lives exclusively in six regions in [only] a few Chinese provinces.” Even National Geographic wrote that “There is much that remains unknown about the diversity of prehistoric pandas and their precise placement in time” But I could add a little imagination to the data and extrapolate to crashed cyanide-needing aliens.
I could imagine the panda-like aliens’ degeneration happening over thousands of years. Suppose a millennia-long search for the missing ship discovered the descendants of their ancestors in zoos, having been hunted for their fur and having lost most of their cognitive ability? Might they not blame humanity and want revenge?
In other words: First research what you can and then apply your writer’s imagination. You don’t need to have fought in Vietnam to describe jungle warfare, nor do you need to have flown a drone to know how they might be used in a war. Research, then apply what you learned to your writing about your characters or the situations they find themselves in.
In another example: I’m currently writing a cozy mystery series set on Great Britain’s canals. I’ve been to England, but never traveled the canals. How did I do write about them, then? I read articles online (including articles on the flora and fauna along the canals, bought (classic) books on living on a narrowboat, and watched a lot of YouTube videos (shout out to David Johns’ “Cruising the Cut.”) I used Google Maps to wander around the villages and cities my protagonist travels through. I was even able to walk virtually along the canal paths. All from the comfort of my writing desk (or coffee shop.)
I leave you with some advice from Ursula K. LeGuin: author of the Earthsea fantasy series. “Commonly, many authors' first work is inspired by a life event because that's what we know... But when you have that out of your system, remember, you may know dragons.”
