Doing My Homework: How to Write What I Don't Know

Back when I was in high school, I wrote a short story based on the Arthurian legend. It still one of my areas of fascination, but at the time I'd read more fiction on it than fact. Though I loved books set in England, I'd never been there, and really knew nothing about what it was really like. The story probably wasn't convincing, because I based it in my own experience, and my experience was very limited.

"Write what you know." It's probably one of the pieces of advice that most writers hear. But I'm a fantasy writer -- how can I write about my personal experiences in the context of fantasy? Doesn't that limit everyone to very prosaic stories about everyday life?

To begin with, I've always taken that advice as "write what you understand", not about writing only in the context of my personal experience. In order for a book to be accessible to readers, it has to carry themes and emotions that are universal. In that sense, "write what you know" really is important. It means that whether you are writing fantasy, science fiction, mysery, or the next Great American Novel, your people have to be people, their experiences have to make sense, and your reader has to understand and be able to in some sense understand or identify with what you're writing.

But what happens when a part of your plot depends on what you don't know or understand?

One way to handle that is to not write it. That's certainly a viable approach to take, especially when dealing with marginalized peoples or cultural appropriation, and that's not what this blog post is about. I'd be very hesitant to jump into those waters, and others can speak to it much better than I. What I am speaking of is how to write a convincing story involving large elements of experiences I don't know about on a much smaller scale. My story involving King Arthur was unconvincing because I knew nothing about England, and set it there anyway. As with many young writers, I made it up. It didn't ring true, because I, well -- made it up. "Yes," you may say, "but aren't you making things up in fantasy writing?" And I would have to answer, "Yes, I am -- to a point." Of course, when I was in high school, there was no Internet at the tip of my fingers to go to for information. I had to go look up things in encyclopedias, and hope that they gave enough information for me to be convincing, or do a major research project involving things like, "How does it feel to live in England?" And chances are, I would never find the resource that best fit my need, because I couldn't look up the question; I would have had to look up books on "life in England", or just "England", and narrow it down from there. It was a pretty daunting task in those days.

That's one of the things I love most about the Internet. I can go type in "How does it feel to live in England?" and get pages and pages of results. I still have to narrow things down, but the time it takes (given that the resultant data is searchable) is manageable. So now, those things I don't know about? They are findable, with relative ease.

I first found this out while writing a short story, "Following Seas". It was inspired by folk songs which were about young women running away to sea to be with their lovers by disguising themselves as boys. As a woman, I could easily see the impracticality in this situation -- most women would be found out the first time they tried to empty their bladder. But my genre is fantasy, and voila! that's where the magic came in: in disguising my character as a boy. I didn't see this entire story as being likely without magic. But ironically, that wasn't the most difficult part of this story -- it was creating the verisimiltude of what it felt like to be on a merchant sailing ship.

So I hopped onto the Internet, and started searches which soon boiled down to "Dutch merchant sailing ships of the 18th century". I learned an awful lot about the subject. I learned what a poop deck really is, how big the vessel was, and what its weaknesses were: so much, that cutting down to just enough detail for a short story was my primary challenge. But the work really paid off when I read it at a convention, and was asked how I knew so much about the subject. Since then, research has become a staple of my writing.

And that, of course, is how I write about what I don't know. I do my homework, and try to use the knowledge I've gathered to make it work in the context of my stories. As many writers these days, I've got an odd search history. I've searched for such diverse things as mercury poisoning, mountain botany, techniques for sword sharpening, ordinary house plant growth and care, leprosy, metal harp strings -- I don't even remember all of what I've researched. Not enough to write college papers about, but enough to bring what I write into a convincing place. It's especially helpful when I'm feeling uninspired -- the mountain botany search ended up creating four pages of writing. In the revision, I cut it back down again to about a paragraph and a half. But that little paragraph and a half (hopefully) grounded my readers in the world, and makes it seem like it has depth and history.

Of course, all the research in the world won't help if the writer doesn't understand the themes they are working with. But that's another story for another time.