Writers: ‘You Know Nothing’
Write what you know, but be sure you do.
‘Write what you know’ sounds like a great place to start when you begin to consider the kind of story you’re inspired to write.
For a police officer with half a lifetime protecting the streets, memories good and bad constitute a vast library of experiences to draw from as a basis for a crime drama or procedural involving gangs, drugs, and robberies both armed and stealthy. But if that officer never worked in homicides, would they know enough to craft a whodunnit or a hunt for a serial killer?
A nurse with thousands of shifts among such hospital departments as emergency, intensive care, and surgery has likely witnessed degrees and nuances of emotion unknown to most other humans, but is that enough knowledge and wisdom to write a romantic thriller?
There was a time when either writer might well have gotten away with novels set in the peripheries of their knowledge and experience, but not so much today. Modern readers ‘know’ shit, most of it stuff they don’t even know they know, details and protocols they picked up watching Criminal Minds or General Hospital, and if something in your story contradicts the gospels of CBS or NBC or the BBC, there could be trouble.
Voluntary Suspension of Disbelief (VSD)
Every fictional story requires an audience to set aside critical thought and embrace the illusion presented to them. This is known as ‘voluntary suspension of disbelief.’
The best tales — page-turners and hit films — are those that conjure the most realistic, most comprehensive alternative realities. It follows, then, that the writer is obligated, even duty-bound, to develop as wide and as deep an expertise in her subject field as possible.
It’s not enough that you wrote your master’s thesis on the spread of the Hudson’s Bay Company west across the British territories of the New World. Knowing the fur trade routes of Lower Canada, the various First Nations tribes’ territories, and rivalries, it’s all for naught if you describe them riding their horse with saddles. They rode bareback. If a European rider was killed, the first thing an indigenous warrior did was cut the saddle away. And it’s impossible to re-load a musket at the gallop. Period.
These details count, not only for you to show your investment in your story, but more importantly, to sustain your reader’s VSD.
Research Fosters Creativity
Most aspiring novelists don’t have a depth of background from either of the examples above. In fact, it could be argued that the less you know about something, the less you need to unlearn.
Outside of school, we ‘learn’ in bits and pieces. We learn that the United States has dozens of independent law enforcement and intelligence-gathering agencies. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms (ATF), the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA); the list goes on and on.
They are not the same. They aren’t organized in similar ways nor do they operate like their bureaucratic cousins. What you know about one of these entities likely does not apply to any other. I once read a novel where the author’s research had all the depth of a decade of primetime television and while he used most of those I listed above, they were copycats of one another. I didn’t finish the book.
That said, the mandates of these agencies often overlap, but God forbid they share intelligence. Instead, each hoards information that might improve overall effectiveness just for the chance to score political points and media victories.
Research is the best way to uncover the story in any subject, particularly if you constantly ask yourself ‘what if?’ and twist everything you learn this way and that until something unexpected jumps up and shouts, ‘Hey!’
Lying Successfully
Lying is a virtue for writers of fiction. I encourage you to lie as much as possible when you write, but there is a catch. Asking ‘What if?’ is creative magic, but every flight of fancy requires a rationale the reader will accept within their VSD, a consistent structure or framework that makes sense within your story’s context.
In other words, ‘why?’ What makes your idea not merely possible, but plausible? What if a young woman, a middle child and lacking parental interest, inherits her estranged uncle’s WWII-era PBY flying boat, currently tethered to a dock in the Bahamas?
‘Why’ might this situation arise? I’ll tell you. The uncle was a younger son of a large and influential American family. He chose to join the Air Force and flew in Vietnam. After the war, he bought the PBY and hauled cargoes legally and not into isolated points in the Caribbean. He once flew the plane home for the girl’s oldest brother’s wedding.
No one noticed the girl leave the party and investigate the plane. She discovered her uncle and the wife of a guest in a compromising encounter but then distracted the woman’s husband long enough for the uncle and wife to dress. As a reward, the uncle took the girl for a flight and let her take control.
She discovered the thing she loves most — flying — but was denied from pursuing it by her father. When she learns the PBY is her inheritance, she runs away to collect it, initiating an intense romantic adventure that spans the Caribbean and Central America. The script is my own, with the working title ‘Pilot Girl,’ and is sequenced but unfinished, with pacing to rival Romancing the Stone.
Never Assume Your Expertise
However much you know about a subject or field, it is not enough. Nor is it sufficiently contiguous, by which I mean, lacking gaps. I’m a scratch cook but would never refer to myself as a chef because there are areas of cooking in which I know little. I have never made pasta, for instance, partly because I lacked counter space but mostly because I had no interest in it when I could access a high-quality local source. But, where I to write an underdog story about a girl on the street, a homeless addict, who watches how a restaurant kitchen works from her hide-out in the ceiling and then enters and wins a culinary contest, I might try making pasta for no other reason than to better know my subject. And I realize the similarities to Ratatouille, but this is just an example.
Whatever you think you know about something, ignore it and focus on what about it attracted you in the first place. Research that, and you’ll find your story.
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Life long apprentice of Story and acolyte in service to the gods of composition — Grammaria, Poetris and Themeus.
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