Writing What You Know

"He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I know."--Abraham Lincoln

Caveat Lector: I'm not writing this essay/article from the standpoint of doing the things discussed below any better than the next writer on the street, and I hope you'll see from the examples that there are numerous issues I'm working on! Rather, this is so others can benefit from my experiences writing, critiquing, and feeling my way around all this. Also note that I am speaking to people who are writing in hopes of getting published. As in all things, take my words with a grain of salt; there are many other excellent resources on the subject, including Forward Motion for Writers and the SFWA's pages, which cover related topics in more detail.

Thanks again to Chymera for some great discussions about the craft of writing.

What Do You Know?

That's neither a challenge nor a rhetorical question. Let me explain.

Science fiction and fantasy (sf/f) have the peculiar property that it's not necessarily possible to write the things you know, or it's possible to a limited degree. I've never been on a space shuttle, or in a battle, and I've never cast a spell, or any number of things I've written about. That doesn't mean that research is impossible--far from it!--but it does mean that it's less obvious. (One of the greatest compliments I got for "Echoes Down an Endless Hall" during an initial critique was from a Vietnam War veteran, who found the story convincing other than the fact that none of the soldiers was talking about sex, which I duly added. So it can be done.) In these genres, "write what you know" as advice has to be tempered with the realities, or nonrealities, of the world(s) in question.

The other issue that I'd like to address is less specific to sf/f, and has to do with those times when you are literally "writing what you know." A fallacy that can strike any writer is to assume, consciously or unconsciously, that the reader has access to your headspace, and therefore fail to explain what's going on adequately. This is by no means a reason to stop writing about something you know about--but there are some things you should be cautious about.

Research and Extrapolation

Fine, you say. I want to write about elves, or swordfights, or battles in space. How do I research these things? How do I experience these things?

Elves are not so bad; a visit to the local library should turn up a bounty of mythology and folklore, and enough modern fantasies use elves that you could refer to them, with mixed results. (It's a good idea to be familiar with what other authors have done with any given trope.) For swordfights, you might join the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA), read up on kenjutsu, watch a demonstration at a Renaissance Faire, or query a museum. (I queried the Royal Armouries on double-headed axes once, and received a detailed and helpful response. Ask politely.)

Many things that you have trouble experiencing directly can be researched, as in the examples above. You can find books on the most obscure subjects. Even better, with the advent of the internet it's become easier to find other people who have expertise in those subjects (though it helps to consult multiple sources and check into reliability). I have a writer-friend whom I toss questions about horses now and then, and I run physics by my physics-doctoral-student husband. I've made polite inquiries to strangers and gotten some helpful information and pointers toward other resources. The worst they can do is send you an abusive email back, in which case you just ask someone else.

Have trouble figuring out what a working physicist would do in a space station? Look a few up at your local university and ask. Don't know what kinds of injuries a knight might sustain from falling from his destrier? Ask someone who teaches equitation, or look into historical records of tournaments and battles. Don't know how strategy in space would differ from groundbound combat? There are books on the subject, and maybe a retired Air Force pilot would be willing to speculate. (Kooky as it sounds, I've considered learning the RTS computer games Homeworld and Cataclysm because they implement three-dimensional combat-in-space.) Read other sf/f writers' treatments, check for plausibility, consult, consult, consult.

Sometimes a little real-world experience can go a long way, if you're not expecting to become an expert in three weeks. One personal experience can sometimes illuminate what a stack of books cannot (as a shameless bibliophile, I hate to admit this). It may not be as hard to find, if you're willing to accept "substitutes" and extrapolate while bringing other resources to bear.

I had no idea what it was like to load and fire a gun, shoot an arrow, hold a sword, or ride a horse. So I took advantage of Cornell's Physical Education department (practically the first time in my life I appreciated P.E.) and took riflery, archery, classical fencing and equitation. I claim no expertise in any of these things (I'm a lousy shot with anything). But the things I learned--

I learned that you steady a rifle at your shoulder (and that you don't do this with a shotgun). Before, I'd had some fuzzy vision of holding the thing out in front of you. I learned how hard it can be to string a bow if you don't have any upper body strength to speak of, and the whistle-thud of an arrow flying home to its target. I learned that holding a rapier in a correct position for longer than five minutes is not as easy as it looks. And I learned what horses smell like and just how broad their backs are.

While I won't claim that I write especially good horsey scenes or swordfighting scenes, I write better such scenes than I did before I took those classes. If you're lucky, you might have a friend or acquaintance who's willing to let you follow him/her around a biology lab for an hour, or show you how to grip a sai properly, or whatever you'd like to find out.

There's also extrapolation, whether from book-research or personal-experience or something else. You might have to extrapolate what it's like to ride an alien beastie from your one time on a donkey's back, as you're unlikely to find your beasties. I've had to extrapolate the "rules" of space warfare in brief battle scenes in my sf.

There are two things I try to keep in mind when I do this. First, pick a reasonable model. I decided, for "The Black Abacus," that ground warfare made a lousy model for the strange, mathematical-analysis waveform warfare in that story. Information theory, on the other hand, was closer to what I had in mind. This probably didn't register on the reader at all, and I ended up using a brief fencing metaphor to convey that it was a battle, but it shaped the way I conceptualized warfare.

Another example: languages in my novel-in-progress Paper Knives. One of the major nations portrayed, Qenar, is modeled somewhat after Renaissance-era Switzerland. Originally, Qenar and the neighboring nation Avrezin shared one language. Years of monolingual assumptions are hard to eradicate. Then I started thinking about the history of the region. Qenar had started out as independent bands of people invaded by steppes horsemen (who are the ancestors of most "modern" Qenaren), evolved into more-or-less independent city-states, some of which functioned as client-states to Avrezin...the more I thought about it, the less it made sense for all of Qenar to consist of monolinguals, though the language-in-common worked as a lingua franca. And looking at Switzerland and its history, it, too, is characterized by multiple languages. My initial language model was off-base. The average reader, I suspect, wouldn't notice either way, but it's worth thinking these things through.

The second thing I do is to decide upon assumptions, simplifying or otherwise, in creating that extrapolation. If I'm stuck using fencing as a model for zweihander, I'd better be careful about assumptions to squeeze as much use out of my model as I can. Designing sociopollitical and -economic structures also benefits from this: What professions carry prestige, and why? What does this imply about social mobility? How would instantaneous communications have affected the Romans (yeah, right)? You don't need to write every step out, unless it helps you. But a critical awareness of the process can be invaluable, especially in worldbuilding.

As Paul Urayama quipped, "Writers don't have friends, they have resources." And how true it is, so make the most of your ~~resources~~ friends, if they're willing.

When You Know "Too Much"

This is a separate issue from the one addressed above. As aforementioned, it's also less specific to sf/f, and could apply to anything from expository essays to experimental surrealist poetry. (Maybe not so much the poetry.) Nevertheless, it's connected to the "write what you know" rule-of-thumb, so it seems reasonable to discuss it here.

First, an anecdote: I've come to realize that one of the attractions of sf/f for me is the fact that readers theoretically start at "ground zero." If a writer introduces an alien society of GizmoGimps, s/he is obliged to explain GizmoGimps to me. (In reality, there exists a common vocabulary of ideas and tropes that sf/f writers use, including runes, ansibles, and others.) In much mainstream fiction, on the other hand, my personal background is "alien" enough to prevent me from understanding some of the cultural assumptions and references. I could puzzle out "telly" and "tube," but Mork and Mindy and Tupperware parties were outside my realm of experience. These are reasonable things to assume in an American reading audience; I didn't fit that audience as well as I could have liked.

With that anecdote in mind, I've also discovered that "writing what you know" can be dangerous, in the sense that you-as-writer get blindsided by your assumptions about what the reader knows. This can show up in any number of areas: characterization, wherein you know why Jane Average fell for Joe Dweeb, but these reasons didn't make it onto the page and the romance remains inexplicable to the reader; plot, wherein the reader has no clue what happened in that spine-tingling combat chapter; setting, wherein you forget to cue the reader that the whole story is in fact set in an alternate history Colonial America; diction, wherein vast amounts of jargon, slang, classical allusions, or what-have-you confuse the issue. The list could go on.

Mantra: the reader is not psychic. You have the advantage over any outside reader, as far as your story in concerned, in that you know exactly what you mean. (Or you have a better idea about what you meant, anyway.) The reader does not have this background knowledge. The reader is not you; the reader should not be expected to intuit certain things just because you know them. (You have to make a few assumptions, and knowing which ones to make can be tricky. That's what critiquers are there to tell you.)

Corollary: information that isn't conveyed to the reader does not help the reader. Imparting information to the reader gracefully has been an Achilles heel for me. You have to ride the line between too much information (when the reader should be focusing on other things) and too little information (when the reader would like to know). You may be conveying the information, but in the wrong place, at the wrong time, or too obliquely for anyone else to catch on. It happens. Find out about it and fix it.

Remember that some readers are quicker on the uptake than others. I'm dense about locations and visual detail, for example, but most readers seem to be visually-oriented, so you want to keep them in mind, not me. If you can cue in slower readers without making others impatient, it doesn't hurt you to do so.

Mantra: The story is for the reader. Let me qualify this: much of this is aimed at people writing for (paid) publication, which implies readers other than yourself and your best friend. If you're not writing for publication, but for yourself and perhaps a few others, ignore me. I must also note that writing slick, soulless work solely for the faceless "readers" and $$ (ha!) is not what I'm getting at.

Ultimately, you (and your Muse) are the arbiter of your work's quality. Writing is, in its own way, a public and intimate act; it requires the meeting of your mind and a reader's (with a publisher as intermediary). When you "write what you know," it behooves you to remember that the reader is not you and may only resonate with your thoughts and ideas to the extent that you allow him/her to do so. You may attempt to impose your ideas and passions upon the reader, at least for the story's duration; you will do so more effectively if you keep in mind the eye on the outside looking in, the skeptical glance, the puzzled look.

One of my interests in sf/f is linguistics. I may want to fling the beauties of triconsonantal morphology and active case-marking at the reader in Paper Knives; I have resisted doing so because the average reader is not going to share my interest in the subject (at least, not to the point of caring about the morphology of a skeletal constructed language). That doesn't mean that I am going to neglect mentioning linguistics in that story, or any other; it does mean that I must remember to do so when the reader will care, and do so in a way that conveys why I care and why they might care, too, in the story's context.

To put it another way, a lot of this discussion can be summarized as a take on the Reader's Fundamental Question: Why do I care? As the author, writing about something you know, it is obvious to you why you care about X, Y or Z. (At least, I hope you're writing about something you care about.) This may be a necessary condition; it is not sufficient. To make it sufficient, I have to answer the Reader's Fundamental Question in some form, or the reader may stop reading.

Closing Thoughts

This essay was triggered by a round of thoughtful critiques and the ensuing discussions on Chymera. I've attempted to summarize my thoughts in a coherent form (and to answer you-the-reader's Fundamental Question). Use the thoughts above insofar as they help you, as ever.

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