Yes, I am totally taking Alma’s title. If she didn’t want me to, she shouldn’t have left it lying about un-nailed to the floor. What is she going to do about it now?
Or, if you prefer, I’m riffing on her theme, because having thought about it, I have things to say. (I know this surprises everyone!)
I’ve always been driven incoherent and into spittle-flecked rages by the opposite advice: write what you know.
Um…. okay, not always. I believed it when I was young, and lamented I knew — as in had experienced — so little.
Then I spent 20 years in writers’ groups with people who wrote their experiences, traumas and half-remembered childhood, over and over again, until my eyes glazed, and the toothpicks I put up to hold up my eyelids broke. Look, your story of your favorite teddy bear being eaten by a dog wasn’t fascinating the first time. Telling it now set in space, or the bear set on fire by a dragon doesn’t improve it that much. Particularly was you keep leaning into reality.
The truth — sad to say — is that very few of us were interplanetary pirates, or wizards who saved the world, or other interesting characters I mean, my life has been more interesting than most, but if I leaned into my true experiences, it would still make your eyes glaze, and paint drying be much more fun.
I suspect that’s how we get those genius stories like “Growing tomatoes on an alien planet is totally SF.”
The truth is if you write non-terminally literary and want to be read, and give your readers fun experiences, you’re going to have to write what you don’t know, in the sense of stuff you’ve never lived through.
Now, you should, if possible, know what you’re writing about, in the sense that someone who has a cursory knowledge of the subject will not be offended.
The importance of knowing/using the right information, varies.
I happen to know that my SF will drive physicists (and probably other scientists) to drinking and crying. But bah. Part of it is rule of cool. Part of it is various short cuts to make it more fun and — pats local scientists on the back — the general public really doesn’t care and ALSO honestly, y’all, at the distance of 500 years or so, which I write, a lot of your knowledge could be overturned. Or more importantly, side-run, which is like end run but more like playing a trick on physics. Things that shouldn’t work but do, and then we find the explanation, that kind of thing. I mean, it’s not nice to fool mother nature, but we do all the time, and the universe is held together by narrativium. IOW, I’ll buy you a beer at a con, and you can cry into it. Also, yeah, I normally know D*mn well what I’m doing wrong, but meh, I’m having too much fun to stop. Or as the late great Jerry Pournelle told me about one time when he disapproved of one of my fudges: “I’m not telling you not to fudge it. I’m telling to either make the dance more interesting, or dance off stage faster, before we realize you’re naked!”
But part of this is very much “what you can fudge.” For instance, yesterday a friend was complaining that a book set in a city she knows really well had missed a lot of opportunities, while saying some stuff only tourists believe. That’s fine. The book still did great, because you know? most people (by law of averages) who read it aren’t that well acquainted with that city, and the ones who are are at tourist level.
Heck, we watched one of those “things to do in Denver” programs the other day and were laughing our heads off, because despite knowing the city really well over thirty years, none of the things they mentioned were known to us, and the things we loved to do were not mentioned.
It used to be the rule was to only make sure you knew NYC really well, because most of the editors and publishers did, and would spot mistakes. But you know, in Indy, probably not even that.
OTOH there are things you should dang well know because they are part of what everyone who reads that genre or subgenre knows.
Like, if you’re writing regency romance (or Jane Austen fanfic) please acquaint yourself with the rules of nobility/noble names/forms of address in regency England. Debrets can help, and there are many propularizing books.
And … well, be aware of what you don’t know.
To explain, I tend to read a lot of JAFF when I’m out of it or semi-out of it, because it requires very little thought and almost no emotional involvement. (I mean, I know how it turns out.) But it really drives me nuts when I come across something completely insane. Like the Bennets inherit a title of nobility, which is not really a title. What I mean is he doesn’t become a viscount or an earl, or even a baronet. He’s just suddenly and inexplicably referred to as “Lord Bennet.” And none of it makes any sense.
Or … well, there’s a pretty decent writer who ROUTINELY drives me nuts by not seeming to understand what a godfather is. As in, Mr. Darcy Senior is Whickam’s godfather. She gives them different first names, which makes me go “okay, more common in modern times. Back then — or in my day — you got your godfather or mother’s first name.” THAT’s semi-excusable, though grating over ten or so stories. HOWEVER she also, then, has Mr. Darcy become George Whickam’s godfather when the kid is like 14 and withdraw godfatherhood when he gets upset…. and…. WHAT?
Today I stumbled on the author’s bio and realized she’s not American or British, and almost certainly not Christian. (The culture also explains why she thinks Georgiana’s diminutive would be Gigi. I can’t think of anything stranger for the regency, but carry on. Or why she invents an elaborate story on why Catherine Bennet is called Kitty which was a normal diminutive for the regency.) That’s fine. I mean, it’s JAFF, and it crosses cultural lines. BUT in the name of all that’s holy, how hard is it to look up what a “godfather” meant in that place and time. YOU HAVE THE INTERNET. And it’s something that a significant portion of your readers will stumble on. (Not the name thing. I think you need to be my age and from a traditional culture to be bothered by that. But the oh, now he’s a godfather, now he’s not.) Unless of course she did, and got the mob sense. (Horrified face.) Okay, so ask someone from the culture/dominant religion.
Now not knowing those things wouldn’t be a problem at all if she were writing generic fantasy or science fiction.
OTOH if I ever traipse into Tolkiennesque or D & D like fantasy, I’ll need to do so much research. Particularly into D & D beings and classes because I don’t play. And therefore, I have no clue what the conventions are for these critters.
And you shouldn’t violate what most people reading it know, without a good reason, or amusing explanation.
And there you have it. If you’re going to write what you don’t know, you must also know what your audience knows.
And if you’re going to kick what they know around?
Make it interesting, make it fun.
And above all, dance off stage really fast, before they realize you’re naked. 😉
Mad Genius Club 
22 responses to “Writing What You Don’t Know by Sarah A. Hoyt”
And if you’re writing about an existing place, don’t whine or otherwise get upset if you get the existing place completely wrong.
Apparently, one “big name” writer wrote a story set in St. Louis Missouri but his St. Louis Missouri was a small “hick” town.
And yes, he didn’t like being told that he was wrong about St. Louis Missouri. 😉
“write what you know”
The down side to that moldy advise is when you know that the age old adage “hours and hours of boredom, interrupted by moments of stark terror” is 100% accurate. (Applies to several careers that I can think of.) I mean, how do you take ‘hours of boredom’ and make it interesting?
Life as a cop isn’t half as *cough* interesting as Hollyweird has led us to belief. [LawDog not withstanding] And let’s not go into how long those lab results really take.
On the other hand, if you can find a way to write a good story that has a more accurate take on how long stuff actually takes, it can be a pretty novel experience for people used to “send it to the lab” magic.
Yup. If it just happened you might work on that one case all day, maybe even a couple of days. Most days there’ll be a dozen different cases being followed up on, and others sitting there with no leads.
And even with LawDog, those stories were collected over the course of decades in law enforcement. I’d be willing to bet that if you put all of them together you’d get the equivalent of one every two or three months, at most.
Hoo … boy. In my last historical, some of the main characters spent a lot of time in WWII-era Brisbane, Australia, a place I have never been to (although my daughter has) … and my most informative guide to that place was Kate Paulk, who grew up there at a slightly later time. But she sent me several long emails, full of all kinds of nuggets of local-specific knowledge, about how it was. That the smell of rotting mangos filled the air in the suburbs, because people grew them for shade, and the fruit went from unripe to disgustingly overripe with the speed of light, and dropped to the ground. That there was a service who came around with a horse-drawn cart to empty the contents of the outhouses because most places then didn’t have sewer service. I think my second-most useful source for sussing out how a place looked was Google Maps/Street view. After that, a countless series of local nostalgic websites dealing with historic buildings and neighborhoods. I had a good handle on how things looked, or would have looked then – but Kate gave me a serious notion of how the place smelt
“Particularly into D & D beings and classes because I don’t play. And therefore, I have no clue what the conventions are for these critters.”
Case in point, you didn’t even realize that you made an unintentional reference. There is a very large fandom of a famous online D&D playing group who are called “Critters.” (The group is Critical Role, so the nickname makes sense.)
Of course, were you to do this in a paying product, I’d advise you to act like you’d done it on purpose. 😉
OTOH, it has been my observation that the best GameLit plays light and fast with the rules.
That’s the big cup approach. Most people aren’t big D&D nerds. Some of the D?&D nerds will be so off put that they won’t buy the book, but most of them seem to sau “hey! D&D reference/setting. Imma give it a try!”
Then you might get the normies that might’ve sorta heard of D&D, but are just in it for generic but good fantasy and characters that aren’t diversicrap.
It’s not just the readers don’t know it. It’s that many tropes work well in one and are poison in another. I have an entire tag full of posts on my post about the DM vs. the writer on that topic.
Feel free to steal!
Flying stories tend to have a lot of boring stuff left out. Ideally, the entire flying part of the flight is boring, and the parts on the ground involving the plane are almost as boring. But no one wants to read about a ten hour flight that went really smoothly and had one moment of mild excitement when the co-pilot’s preferred supper choice wasn’t available on that leg.
“Write what you know” is how you get too much modern SF/F, where it’s 10,000 years in the future and the Space Millennials are watching Space Netflix and worrying about Space Climate Change.
Obviously you haven’t been paying attention to the weather out there…
https://www.spaceweather.com/
The Space Climate Change is undoubtedly caused by all the CO2 that SpaceX methane-fueled rockets dumped into space 10,000 years earlier.
One mildly wonders what would happen if all the regulars used the title. . . .
Search engines would have migraines … Hmmmmmmmmmmm.
I observe that creating your very own imaginary world does not protect you from getting it wrong in the ideas of some readers. The sort who will lecture you about how feudalism works in your world.
Or how your imaginary language is wrong.
I stopped writing a short story once because the imaginary language was forcing me (me forcing me, really) to list out the proper declension for the modern, archaic, and truly ancient nouns (they were names of fortresses and things) into nominative, dative, genitive, etc… And then apply regional flavor.
Tolkien I am most certainly *not.* Not even a little bit. That one goes onto the shelf until that little bit of craziness settles down. I’m not purposely driving myself crazy.
No, really.
I stay off the sites to create languages BECAUSE I’m a linguist. I could drop in there and never come out as I tweaked.
To me, that actually sounds like FUN. For a while, at least. But that’s from the guy who spent his 18k-word novella making MC1 sound vaguely Aussie and MC2 speak in so thick a “Scots brogue” that it would stick to your shoes.
The thing that boggles me is how readers react to things tossed off rather carelessly at times. I occasionally get comments on how “realistic” the setting is, or how “smart” the MC appears.
I don’t get that- but I’m glad they like the story. Mostly it’s just punchy little pulp sci-fi action tidbits that somehow grew into a story. That I need to write more on.
It’s a bloody good thing I’m not writing what I know. A lot of it would be boring, and some of the interesting bits shouldn’t even be written (permission and whatnot). And, aside from the living in space bits, I wouldn’t *want* to know much about the coming apocalypse (that I hope won’t actually occur).