You know that advice about writing what you know? Watch out for that… We’re not writing non-fiction here, after all, most of the time — we’re writing stories.

There’s a common issue I encounter sometimes, esp. in MilSciFi and other technical-expertise genres — a sort of imbalance between authorial expertise and actual story.

I was reading a recent sort of medical-SFF that exemplified the issue. The heroine is a contemporary Terran paramedic who ends up in an all-us-aliens-together-helping-interplanetary-emergencies sort of plot. The character is fine, the basic setup is fine, but the story… not so much.

You see, the author is so busy pointing out all the technical details of a Terran paramedic adapting to treating alien injuries and learning how her new environment works, that there’s really not a lot of story going on. The people she associates with are just working-type aliens who discuss their technical experience, and how to update their manuals for others, but they can’t even share much in the way of intoxicating beverages, so there’s hardly any socializing between them. The author is so busy orienting the readers to details of the paramedic profession that they might not already know that the characters themselves and their potential relationships are scanted. We end up knowing all sorts of information that isn’t important, and the story just sits there without an engine. What happens to the general human/other connection story, which seems to exist as an afterthought to updating the technical manual?

This seems to particularly be an issue in some Mil-SFF, no doubt mirroring the author’s non-fiction experience. But what would a conventional book be like if it was full of explanations about everything to the same depth? Read about a gold miner, and get a complete lecture about how that works (instead of the basic flavor and setup), before getting on with the story? The history and specialties and tips for knitting or baking instead of a warm-relationship cozy?

Too much expertise and not enough relationships, living, and growth are not what readers are interested in, most of the time.

Imagine if Jack and the Beanstalk took up a lot of time telling (explaining) about cows, beans, and giants, instead of just showing what ever part of that is necessary?

Or if books about wizardry never left the minutiae of spell-weaving?

“Write what you know” is only a starting place (and, yes, you particularly don’t want to be on the hook for errors there and lose the trust of your readers). But you need more than real world competence — you need to show a world that’s more than expertise. You need to tell a story and draw your reader in. The technical expertise is only a tool.

Doing it right? I admire some of the Western work from Peter Grant where the armament and ranching/mining details are hyper-correct, and it doesn’t get in the way of the story at all. Who else do you know like that?