Facts and emotions – both are areas where there’s a lot the individual doesn’t know. Imagination can fill in some of the blanks, especially in fantasy and sci-fi, but you gotta have a baseline to build on. If you are dealing with emotion and how people would respond to different things, let’s face it, despite what you see on certain forms of media, guys and ladies are NOT the same. In any culture, you’re going to have men and women, males and females, who are different. How do you, the writer, create a believable world for them and with them?
First, you need to figure out what you don’t know. Some of this will come as you world-build and realize “Hey, if the culture is like [this], then a male is probably not going to respond to an insult by [whatever]. So what analogues do I have to look at?” Or you may observe that none of your characters will eat something that The Author knows is in-world edible. Why not? What leads to the creation of a taboo? Off you go to do a little digging, especially if, oh, you realize that you’re creating a world full of taboos, like parts of Polynesia, or some forms of Judaism and other faiths. Or you start thinking about “where does the material for that cloth come from?” Which might lead you to realize that you don’t know about things besides wool, cotton, and linen. Hmmmm, off to find out what other plants make fibers.
I’m sitting here with five books about water mills, mills in general, the history of mills, and a book about the uses of oak in history, all at my elbow, with notepaper and pen before me. I have a character who is a mill wright, a cross between an engineer, machinist, and general contractor. He builds grist mills. A noble wants a new one, in a new location. Except already there’s a conflict, because the lord wants it on a big river. That’s a no-no. Among other problems. The mil wright needs to know about water, water flow and channels, woods, gearing, what should be iron and what be wood, where to find mill stones and a stone-dresser, and the basics of turning grain into quality flour. So I do, too.
So I went looking for information on-line. There’s some, and it’s pretty useful, but I needed more detail. So into the books I went. Interestingly, a number of important books written for millers and mill wrights have been brought back into print. Some are far more technical than I need, some are too modern (all-metal gears), but many are just what I need, once I translate them from Victorian technical manual into medieval blue-collar contractor.
You probably don’t need to go into the weeds the way I am. But keep in mind the rule-of-thumb of handwavium: you can get away with one, maaaaybe two, pieces of pure handwavium in your story. Everything else needs to fit technically and culturally into your book/story. You can do a little, “Well, yeah, transparent steel was thought impossible until 2136, but surely you remember from industrial chem class what happened then?” And the other character says, “Oh, yeah, he got lucky, didn’t he?” and glide on. Alas, I can’t do that with my mill wright. So the author has to plumb the depths of her ignorance in order to learn the technical details I need to bring the world to life.
TL;DR: Figure out what you don’t know, find real-world analogues if you can and work off those, or dig around and figure out how to extrapolate something that works in-story and that readers can believe in story.
Mad Genius Club 
12 responses to “Writing What You Don’t Know – Alma T. C. Boykin”
I’ll admit, world building isn’t my favorite thing, and I tend to stall in it. But I’ve also got a character going through a bunch of stuff I don’t know much about, so I really ought to make a long list of questions I need to answer, and start doing the research to answer them.
1. What does your character need to know? 2. What does the reader need to know that’s different, if anything? 3. What does the author need to know in order to provide the first two?
Some worlds just grow as you write them, and you go back and fill in information or retcon as needed. In other cases, you do need to have the background in hand before you launch, or at least it’s a lot easier if you have the info on hand and in head. In the Cat books, for example, the Azdhagi are half “growed” and half planned. I started with the premise of “what if the reptiles continued to dominate the ecosystems and mammals stayed nothing more than rodents?” From that I got biology, pack behavior, and other stuff. Then I had a character who turned out to be very, very different from all the other Azdhagi, and had to go back and figure out why he was so unusual.
Yeah, and this is doubly and triply true because a lot of what the characters need to know, they don’t, and what they think they know is wrong.
So, not only do I need to understand how everything works, I need to understand how people are misinterpreting it, why they are misinterpreting it, and what clues are there that they’ve got it wrong, without also beating the reader over the head with it, without requiring a character to hug the idiot ball, and without springing it on the reader like an alien space flea from outer space.
Also, none of that was the main theme of the story; it’s just there because it has to be. And this is just the first 1/3 of the story…
Which explains why the whole thing is making my head hurt and being such a bear to keep moving forward on. Apparently I like to set myself impossible architecture challenges in my stories. No, this isn’t the first time, either.
Lastly, I only realized that was the problem as I was typing this…
I love the weeds…
I think it was in Jean Gimpel’s book that I learned about dams on the rivers in France and how the guys downstream would increase the height of their dam and ruin the guys upstream and … etc, etc, etc.
Utterly fascinating.
One of my favorite sources-for-fiction go-tos for visualization is David Macaulay. If you don’t already have it, I recommend Mill (https://www.amazon.com/Mill-David-Macaulay-ebook/dp/B003UHVNKG)
Of course, you have to remember the standard caution that you can always do more research, and at some point, it’s just a way to procrastinate the actual writing.
The other thing you have to avoid is doing so much research that you just can’t resist including all of the little factoids that you’ve learned, also known as “I have suffered for my art, and now it’s the reader’s turn.”
Indeed. When the historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s editor was asked what he wanted on his tombstone, he said, “He got a book out of Frederick Jackson Turner.”
90% of this won’t go into this book. Some may end up in a different book, some is going to be reworked to fit the story world, and the rest will bubble up at inopportune times to bore innocent by-standers at social events. 😉
I write nonfiction. One thing I have learned is when I get writer’s block about writing something, it isn’t really writer’s block. It’s my subconscious telling me I haven’t researched what I am writing well enough and I need to go off and do more research before writing it.
If I am not in a position to do that research I switch to another section of the book and find I can write quite well about that. After I do the research on the blocked section, I go back to it and suddenly don’t have a problem writing it.
Every culture will have males and females…. Laughs hysterically. No, really hysterically. Valium, please. And yeah, working that one out is even more fun!
OK, every culture aside from fish and other sea life. Those critters are … crazy.
Um…. bioengineered humans. Still crazy.
Humans. Crazy. But I repeat myself. *Sighs loudly in cat*