Mostly, I think this bit of advice is taken to mean be sure you understand the technology/sources/sociology/biology/history/etc., etc., of which you speak when you create fictional worlds. The point is to present enough verisimilitude that the world/characters you are describing will operate in believable ways in believable circumstances, so that the story you present does not eject the reader from his enjoyment through any sense of falsity.
Well, sure — that’s a good idea.
However, we must beware of our own personal expertise, especially deeply cherished highly prized expertise in some area. Some of us nerds need reminders about this. We’re supposed to be telling stories, not providing detailed how-to guides, and must avoid giving way to proffering more knowledge about our enthusiasms than any sane reader would ever want interrupting their tale.
When the rider mounts the horse and puts the correct foot in the correct stirrup and settles down, we do not need to also dwell upon the particular bit, or the aids being used as he moves forward, or the differences in gait for different breeds, or…. (yes, this stuff is endless). The reader might “care” in the abstract, but he doesn’t care while reading the story, and he won’t thank you for the wheels-clogging distraction of a mini-lecture.
Bad enough doing this for broad (arguably common) knowledge, of the “How Things/History/Wilderness/Tech Works variety. The more that becomes unnecessarily detailed, the more irritating I find it (as a reader), as though the author were insulting my intelligence/education by under-rating it. (How dumb does he think I am?)
So, I try to balance what I think my readers should know as “common knowledge” (with a few hints to help them if I’m not sure) against things I need to call their attention to for story (how that poison/death trap ambush/bread-baking/weaving/etc. skill works), well enough for them to accurately envision just what’s being planned and what they should expect to happen as a result.
That’s fair. That’s what needs to happen when telling a tale, the equivalent of waving your hands around by the campfire to illustrate what you mean.
However, restraint is called for. And that comes hard to nerds when it’s a topic dear to their hearts.
The more fond I am of a personal skill-set/special-interest rabbit hole, the more seductive I find the authorial opportunity to just… expand upon the less-than-common-knowledge that I assume afflicts my readers, as if I were that dreaded bore at a cocktail party who wants to talk your ear off about a private enthusiasm. It’s not a matter of showing off — it’s the desire to find (or inspire) a kindred enthusiast and then hype each other into an appreciative frenzy.
Which never happens in a random crowd. And your readers are such a random crowd. Yes, there are exceptions: Mystery series which specialize in forensics, Military series which specialize in weaponry, LITRPG magical career development. But not so much in less specialized genres.
I find I’m always wanting to expand on some topics well beyond verisimilitude, though I’ve learned to rein myself in. My temptations include traditional music & musicians, traditional tales & epic, venery, languages, textiles, and much more. Alas, there’s almost never a reason to get past a sentence or two on these topics if an excuse for it comes up in a story. (Sigh…)
I grit my teeth and try not to forget: avoid providing a class lesson for the reader. Fiction is not the place to expound upon your hobbies. Don’t be tempted to show off.
What sorts of personal or other enthusiasms do you find difficult to control (for the reader’s sake) in your own work?
Mad Genius Club 
25 responses to ““Write what you know…” yeah, well, sort of”
Well, right now I’m trying to avoid choking my readers with information about the way a Catholic school year runs. It’s different, especially in 2nd grade, but it needs a very light touch. I think.
Balancing technical detail (oooh, this is so cool, here are the specific kinds of wood you need for these pieces of a mill; here’s how a weaver moves the tablets for this particular design, and here are the plant dyes that would be used, and …) and reader needs. The reader needs to see the technical stuff once, when the character establishes that he or she indeed knows what to do and how, and here’s the basic process. Then stepping back and alluding to it, but not returning to the close-up view.
I deliberately avoid writing about my academic specialty, because 1) it would “out” me and 2) readers would die of detail. (Go read Centennial instead.)
I gave a Civil Air Patrol novel (we’d received it as a review copy) to my brother-in-law. He owned a private plane.
He was RIVITED by those endless checklists to get a plane in the air.
I thought they were even more boring than watching paint dry.
The right book for the right audience!
laughing my head off
As a pilot and a former CAP member, I would probably be riveted right beside him!
I probably wrote a prequel novella just so I could finally find an appropriate place to convey my entire theory of terraforming. My Martha’s Sons characters are all second generation in their lost colony world, and are not going to go around comparing and contrasting Nwwwlf and Earth soil, plant life, or fauna. That prequel let me do my data dump from the POV of Martha, who is a) a biologist, and b) born on Earth. The lengths we go to.
Ah, terraforming. I do a lot of it myself in my Steppes of Mars series.
Soil building from scratch isn’t easy, simple, quick, or cheap. But despite my fascination with turning a world of dead sand into a garden, I do try to keep the details down to a low buzz in the background.
There’s a lot of hand-wavium too!
I really enjoyed your Steppes of Mars and thought you did a good job of keeping the terraforming at the right amount. The references (and all the lichen) made me want to know more.
Thank you! That means a great deal to me.
I’ve gone back to Panschin for the work in progress. It’s turning out … different.
Good news! I’m looking forward to it.
That kind of sounds like the Pern support books I read as a teen, or “The Science of Discworld”– doesn’t even have to be a novel, just in book form.
In my defense, there was a plot, and characters, and stuff. Stuff happened. Really.
:laughs: Nothing to defend, just was amused you did put in plot and such, rather than pure worldbuilding.
Lol. I figured.
The example I have is a murder mystery I read in which the narrator/detective is a barista. She finds the body of an employee in the basement of the shop, calls the cops… and the investigation is promptly derailed twice, first when she makes a cup of Greek coffee for one of the cops and he literally describes it as “just like my grandma used to make,” and then when she breaks off the narrative to lecture the reader about never storing your coffee in the freezer. I walled the book at that point.
It’s a very popular series with (at last count) 21 entries, but I refused to try to get back into it.
:musing: Couple of different ways to read “write what you know,” and some are right, some are wrong.
This is from the POV of the reader, BTW.
The big one that comes to mind for me is, “make sure you don’t violate Known Things on accident.”
AKA, please don’t be That Guy who goes “oh, you’re OK with Superman flying, but not [some stupid thing that is flat wrong for no good reason but the reader is Bad for noticing]”.
I like the “go find bits you can drop so folks feel like it’s not just wallpaper”– there’s a popular tumblr post about “sewer nuns” and their pet alligators, where they give the hint of justifying something by saying “well of course it’s to deal with [other new thing]” and it’s good for making stuff feel real because there’s more layers, although it can be dangerous if you keep going too long. (Contradicting flavor text, weeee!)
I’ve seen info dumps done in a good way because the character is panicking, so they go into intense detail on whatever dang thing they’re doing.
There’s also “somebody asks the character for advice” and they get to show their expertise that way, although sometimes that just makes eyes glaze.
The Iceberg Rule of what the author needs to know vs what they need to show sounds right enough, going off of where I’ve seen series fail because it becomes clear that the author had no idea what was going on beyond “but this sounds cool!”
There’s also the meme where you are advised that experts care passionately about things you don’t even know existed. Which can also be useful.
My personal tic that I have to rein in severely is a tendency to write rather long and complicated sentences. When I go back to revise, I find myself cutting out great swathes of ‘and’s, commas, and making sentences shorter.
Does it matter to my protagonist that her antagonist drives a 1997 Mitsubishi 3000GT VR-4 restored to its former glory? No, it does not. She just sees it as a swoopy red sporty car. Chances are, any hypothetical readers would not care about the year/make/model either, no matter how near and dear to my heart those details might be.
“Fifteen minute break, before we start across.” Mikey called it, and started unbuckling his pack. It was a little early, but better than getting stupid for lack of food or water out in the middle of the scramble. As the horse trading for snacks and rations commenced, he noted Lizzes was wandering off into the boulder field itself. She was peering down at them, and climbing out, away from the group.
About the time he was going to raise his voice and call her back, she made an excited noise, and started digging in her pack until she came up with a little hammer and chisel, and started banging on a rock with quick, sure strikes. “Oooh!”
“What is it?”
“Olivine! I thought so, with a metamorphic gabbro field this rich. And wow, look at the size of that pocket!” She sounded like a kid at Christmas, and looked up, back at the rest of the team. “Ryan, may I have that sealable pouch?”
“Sure?” He started carefully picking his way out to her.
“Yay! Oh, look at that! This one’s gemstone sized! Good Lord, I need to get back out here with a prospecting permit!” She was brushing bits of split rock into her hand and holding them out as if they explained everything. “Hey, can we take our lunch break here? I just need a few hours…”
Mikey found himself out with the rest of the team, looking with mild confusion at the pouch of yellow-green crystals she had collected. Most were roughly the size of a grain of sand, with a few much larger – but none were even as big as his little fingernail. AJ was the one who finally picked up the rock she’d brushed them out of and said, “Okay, it’s not an asteroid. What is it?”
“It’s olivine!” At the blank looks, she waved at the boulders. “It’s a magnesium iron silicate, and it’s actually not a mineral per se, it’s a mineral group running from Forsterite to Fayalite, and while it’s a fairly common mineral in mafic and ultramafic rocks like gabbro here, you can also find it in high-temperature metamorphic…” She stopped not at the blank looks she was getting from Mikey and Miguel, but at the way Ryan was rolling his eyes and mouthing something to Penn, and AJ was grinning. Lizzes let out a breath, deflating. Mikey watched all the animation drain out of her face, along with the joy, and it felt like a gut punch. She stood, and stuffed the pouch and tools back in her pack, and said wearily, “It’s a pretty rock used in foundry casting, and indicates magnesium ore deposits. Nevermind, it’s not oil related.”
“Lizzes.” AJ reached out, and caught her wrist. “You get paid to be enthusiastic about your shit, I get paid to be enthusiastic about mine.” When she looked up warily at him, he held out the rock to her. “First time I start going on about the perfect torque and horsepower curves for an engine, you get one free throw.”
“The what now?” But it got a smile out of her.
Ryan piped up, “Oh, no, don’t ask him about modifying engines, or he’ll never shut up!”
…
Why yes, yes I do go on about geology, and ecology, and realpolitik, and fashion, and flying, and…
But I do my best to make it relevant to the story.
*Raises paw* I can vouch for this. Especially when she has a fascinated audience.
And when something seems obvious, even though you have zero experience . . . double check on it. Fortunately one of my first readers gently “reminded” me that sailing straight downwind was not actually the way to go fastest. And I’m like ???? Huh???? A quick look . . . followed by a deeper dive and I’m rewriting two sea battles . . . .
‘write what you know’ made my roomate’s dad stop writing because he wasn’t interested in writing late 20th century slice of life, because he had no interest in reading it. He used to write SF stuff. Comedic sf, which isn’t my thing but… some of y’all enjoy that
But, but… there’s all sorts of wiggle room for “know”. You can be a (pseudo/real) expert on all sorts of non-contemporary stuff. That’s a shame.
I think it’s more important to “not write what you don’t know” and even more important to “not write what you think you know”. Too many authors will just make up details that they think sound good, or that they read in some other fiction book, or (worst of all) saw in a movie.