Me? Very little indeed. The older I get, the more I learn, the more I realize that I know almost nothing about most things. That whole thing about letting 14 year olds run the world, while they still know everything, is depressingly true. Also, the older I get the more rapidly I quietly back away from so-called (usually by themselves) experts. All too many of them are 14, and have been for many years. I may assure you that my only expertise is at getting myself into trouble. Everything else I do with varying degrees of ineptness, often repeatedly.
That said, I have lived a very unusual life (completely without intent, it just sort of happens to me), and come from a long line of people who evolution should have sorted out of the gene-pool, but somehow failed to. I remember having an argument with some career arts academic… who outright accused me of lying, because I couldn’t possibly have done manual labor AND be a Science academic, and rock-climb and write novels, and that my dad was an African languages linguist AND Mister Mate on a fishing-boat (He fished weekends, commercially) etc. Her world was a very narrow one, it seems.
At the moment I am cutting and bending steel for a concrete slab. Manual labor and I are regular acquaintances. We’re not friends, no. I just keep finding myself having to associate with the bastard. Sometimes repeatedly on the same task (usually have the hang of it by the third time). I still laugh at one the puppy-kickers calling me a rich frat boy. I grew up more on the wrong side of the tracks than the right, but my incredibly frugal parents did send me to a toffee-nosed private school. I was very out of place, but one learns to be a chameleon.
There is no getting away from the fact that it does color my writing. Firstly: the chameleon aspect. When you don’t fit in, but need to, you learn very, very quickly to pick up – not enough to make you a genuine expert, but to sound (and look and behave) like you might fit. This means listening and, well, understanding the mechanism of the ‘others’ you find yourself among. You don’t have to like them – for the most part I didn’t – but you can pass or at least cope. It’s that that helps one to write societies and characters I am not. Secondly: although reality is often too damn unbelievable and bizarre for good fiction, it has provided me with a slew of background color to a lot of things. Thirdly: well, I seem to blunder into disasters. My life seems to be entirely too many close-run things. And fiction is so often disaster, close run things, and making a hopeless mess of it and yet somehow surviving. It’s what I know.
So: tell me about what you know, and how it has affected your writing?
Mad Genius Club 
7 responses to “What do you know?”
I’ve always been fascinated by the “backstage” of the world, all those places and things that modern civilization depends on but most people never see. The jobs I’ve had tend to take me into Authorized Personnel Only spaces–elevator shafts, mechanical rooms, security offices, pipe chases, and the like. As a consequence, I think about those places in the worlds I build for my fiction and I think it gives the fantastic places I invent a certain feeling of reality.
I have two unrelated “expertises” from personal knowledge, one academic and one business/technical.
Starting with Tolkien when he was first available in the USA (my 9th grade), I went down a path of dead languages, traditional cultures, myth, story, etc. — out of interest, not as a career possibility (who knew I would ever turn into a fiction writer?). This spawned adjacent hobbies: trad song, fiddle, etc.
And then, I grew up as a math-type nerd through the heart of the computer-usage industry — primitive programming on electromechanical devices, and then into full-blown commercial programming, 1st-time websites for major corporations, comparative data center performance, etc. As a career, it took me from teenage employee to building/selling small businesses, to running large parts of larger businesses, to (black humor alert) running a major corporate bankruptcy as a private individual (very long and unlikely story) during the tech wreck.
It’s something of an unlikely combo, but it does impact my stories. There’s a flavor of “the world can be changed (industrial revolutions) by all sorts of unusual (usually overtly commercial not political) activities” as part of the background/foreground (depending on plot), with a significant flavor of “here’s how you build a commercial business in any context…”). My heroes tend to be builders of this type, even in the wilderness in the context of survival.
And all my writing tends to include a flavor of “things/customs/remnants of the past are always surrounding us (they manifest in a variety of ways) and they are worth preserving/extending.” Think of it as a religion-adjacent sort of penumbra, without the deities. (My stories do reference religious beliefs, because all cultures do, but I don’t).
I know that there are a lot of “uneducated” people who know more than I ever will, because I’ve gotten to work beside them in aviation and other fields. Experience teaches things that no book can, and aviation in particular used to be rich in oral traditions and “that’s what the book says, but this is what works when the winds are doing X and you need to go Y.” So I kept my mouth shut, ears open, and absorbed older pilots’ experiences. And still landed on my face more than once. As the years pass, I’ve gone from cute, fluffy, and interested to quiet, politely curious, and harmless. Both work as ways to learn more about things like stone cutting, mining, why the EU cattle regs don’t make sense with Hungarian grey cattle*, and other topics.
As you say, Dave, chameleon. My characters tend to either not flaunt what they have, or to go 110% the other way and hide in plain sight. And I like the background details, why magic can’t do that, or why the land is this way and how that affects which crops the colony can grow, even after terraforming.
*Several of us almost fell over trying not to laugh too hard as the farmer grumbled about Eurocrats who were amazed that Hungarian grey cattle are tough enough to spend winters out-of-doors! And summers too!
I imagine that I am a bit like TxRed in having a wildly split background – striving middle-class upbringing in Southern California, a college education (at a good but no-name state uni), followed by 20 years in the military, which was resolutely working-class and people from a mostly rural background, and then spending a lot of time overseas in very different countries from the US. I learned to watch people, very intently … taking note of mannerisms and speech, body language and attitudes.
Both my daughter and I acquired the gift of being able to fit in and have casual conversations among most groups of people. This comes in very handy, both in business, and in writing characters.
“That said, I have lived a very unusual life (completely without intent, it just sort of happens to me)”
I think that can be said about many people that reach their 60s. Lots of stuff happens over six decades. My older brother went from being a physicist to an Orthodox priest to an educator. My younger brother did physical labor in his 20s, sold used cars, became a computer guru (data security) and is now trying to flip houses. Off and on, I have been an officer cadet, a rocket scientist, a roofer and fence builder, a teacher, and a writer. Stuff just happened with all of us.
I know some people live very linear lives (and to some extent I envy them) but many get tossed around by the vagaries of fate. The trick is to mine that experience.
“So: tell me about what you know, and how it has affected your writing?”
I know a ridiculous amount about the physical world, and how things get done/built/made/coded and what have you. I’m a little thin on farming, I admit.
Humans, by contrast, continually mystify me. I have -no- idea what the hell motivates most people. Probably why my books are heavily populated with robots and aliens. ~:D
Outdoors stuff. I mean, I have never gone to a camp site where we had to hike in the tents, but I’ve learned quite a bit. Enough to shudder when someone is very careful to put blankets on top of someone on the ground.
Also flowers and plants and things. It’s amazing how little people know about gardens.