Imagination: Pic Unrelated

You’ve heard the advice. “Write what you know.” You should write about what you know because you’ll be the expert on the matter. “Write about what you specially know” is the advice that comes next, because at a certain point, the event or knowledge is too common to craft engaging writing out of very often. And if you know something that a lot of other people don’t know, they’ll want to know, and your book will sell.

And it makes sense, to a point. If you write about what you don’t know, chances are you’ll end up making some silly mistake that a similar writer with more knowledge would not have, something that more knowledgeable readers will catch.

But you know what? If everyone wrote about exactly what they knew, we’d just have a bunch of different life stories, stories that would plateau at a certain level of realistic excitement. No elves. No aliens. No creepy women hiding in your cupboard as you die of cancer (hey, it was a good story). And from me? No sentient tires. No magic stones that cure dying dogs. No girls growing tomatoes on the ends of their fingers. Wait, if i wrote what I knew, there wouldn’t be any marriages, any births, few deaths, and I could only write about one love. BORING!

If there is any reason to write what you don’t know, it’s selfishness. I do not want to leave all the fun to other people. I want to write about loves I don’t have. I want to write about babies I’ve never held, about dogs I’ve never buried. Besides, those people that lead such interesting lives? Probably too busy to write about them! Maybe they don’t have the skill to communicate the depths of their experiences adequately! Ahh!

There are pitfalls to writing about what you know. Consider them.

Being too inside the subject matter might make it more difficult to communicate to people without the same experience. Whether it’s because you forget to explain that sagwa means apple and apology or because you simply can’t remember the state of mind of people outside, there might be links missing in your path of thought that readers would require.

You know what? This works backward, too.

If you write about something you’re less familiar with from the outside, you’re more likely to bring in associations that you are familiar with to explain the idea and connect it to readers with the same low level of experience that you have. You’ll be sure to explain the parts that were important to you, that are most likely important to new readers as well.

It’s a fight between iconography and accessibility, but that’s a story for another time. I promise. It’s on my to-do list.

A good friend asked me for some insight on how to keep unfamiliar material shaped and emotionally significant. This is what I want to tell her. There is a good dose of imagination involved, and no, I can’t teach you that, but you’d be surprised at how much of myself leaks into even things that I’ve never experienced, just in little descriptions that allow me to connect more emotionally to what I’m writing.

Take, for example, the story here.

Those aren’t my emotions. I haven’t experienced the death of someone in that way. I am not that person. But I have slept in a sleeping bag upside down. I can’t remember why I did. But it helped me feel closer to the speaker of that piece, thinking about why they would have behaved that way and what it would reveal about them.

Maybe that’s the key, at least for me. By inserting small pieces of myself into pieces, it helps me identify with the character. Then I twist it, so it’s not me, and it becomes a different place. It doesn’t even have to work its way into the actual text of the piece. There was a moment in the story about the tire (this is for you, Navi) where the woman sleeps in her car. I don’t have a car. But I have gone into my bathroom with the thought of sleeping in the bathtub, just to get away. By connecting myself with the emotion of that moment, I could bring it to a new location.

It’s why fantasy works, for the most part. We know people and how they act. We just put them in a new environment. Or we build other races from patchwork of human or animal behavior we do know. And in my experience, good science fiction is taking what we know and just rolling it out further: taking the technology we have and advancing it.

So maybe I do mean for you to write what you know, but in a smaller way. By writing things you know how to feel, you help yourself connect to the unfamiliar material in a way that makes it more emotionally significant to readers later.

Write what you don’t know, informed by what you do.