BY RIE SHERIDAN ROSE tweet this
Write What You WANT to Know
I was trying to decide what wisdom I wanted to impart in this blog post. I finally decided to tackle a subject that more experienced writers often give to budding authors trying to break into the business. No, not the first rule of writing, “Show, don’t tell.” Plenty of discussion on that one. Including this PowerPoint presentation on the subject .
I want to talk about the second rule of writing, “Write what you know.” Of course, plenty of words have been generated about this rule too—but in these enlightened days when the information of the entire world is at your fingers, quite literally, as long as you have decent Internet access—I believe in the camp that says this rule needs revision. I think the advice should now be “Write what you want to know”—particularly if you write in the speculative genres.
To me, there’s always been a problem with “Write what you know.” It’s so limiting. I have always considered myself fairly educated, but if I stuck to only the things that I have direct knowledge of, I would never have written any of the novels I’ve had published.
I’ve never seen a dragon, met an elf, traveled to fairyland, or played a lute. I’ve never been lab assistant to an absentminded professor with access to an airship either . . . but I can imagine these things. I can, in other words, “speculate” about what would happen if I were to do any of them. And I have the resources to find contemporary, real-world analogs to them and translate that knowledge into the appropriate language.
For example, I am planning on including a trip to the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in a future adventure in my Conn-Mann series. I have collected resources through the Internet and Amazon that show me in great detail the interiors of the buildings, who exhibited, what a ticket cost, what lodgings were available—none of which I “knew” going into the project.
I wanted to know it, and I went out and learned it. Now it is part of what I know. However, the key here is that it wasn’t part of what I knew before I started the book.
Don’t be limited by current knowledge. It is too easy to research these days and expand your knowledge base to be held captive by the rules. Of course, remember the caveat—don’t base your entire book on one source/website—for example, a user-maintained forum, as they can be fluid and sometimes inaccurate. After you find the initial information you want, use it as a springboard to find corroborating sources.
When I was writing Sidhe Moved Through the Faire, I had some definite ideas going in, but I didn’t know all the information about Celtic mythology I would need to fully flesh out the entire story. But I didn’t need to. I could find the details I didn’t know through research. Research can make you an expert in areas that you don’t “know”. And the next time you need the same or similar information, it will be part of your knowledge base—or at least where to find it will be.
Hand in hand with the notion that you can’t know everything there is to know about your subject, in our world of speculative genres—science fiction, fantasy, horror and their offshoots—many of the subjects that we choose to write about literally cannot be known firsthand.
Despite the desires of multitudes of teenagers, there are no “real” vampires, for example. At least, not any who can turn into mist or bats and live entirely on human blood. There are no dragons breathing fire to be studied through binoculars. No werewolves baying at the full moon. No elves riding shields down staircases while shooting double arrows.
So how can we write about such things if we can’t “know” them? Because we can speculate on them, and from those two magic words “what if . . .” create our own realities.
We can take the tropes and twist them to our own devices. We can have worlds where elves wield magic or fairies fall in love with humans. We can have wizards battle dragons and dragonflies talk. We can have a nine-foot-tall automaton hold conversations with our leading ladies.
Don’t be afraid to explore realities of which you have no direct knowledge. Don’t let “Write what you know” stop you from writing what you want.
Rie writes, edits, and proofs for The X from her home in Austin, Texas. A prolific writer, her short story, “Seven-year Itch,” is featured in Terra Mechanica: A Steampunk Anthology. Her first project for The X, Relative Evil by Debra Erfert, was released in July, 2014.
