How to write about what you don’t know

Remember that old writing adage: write what you know? Why would I want to write about something I already know? What could be more boring? So when I saw a panel at this month’s FenCon, the Dallas-area science fiction/fantasy convention, on writing about what you don’t know, I knew it was a must-see.

Enter a handful of other writers – Dominick D’Aunno, S.B.Divya, Teresa Patterson, and Alan J. Porter   plus writer-actor moderator Lys Childs-Wiley, who also long to push the bounds of their writing – and their imaginations.

“But how do you get started on something you don’t know?” moderator Childs-Wiley asked.

“I started writing to learn,” said Porter, who loves learning, i.e., research, so much he’s claims to be tempted not to get to the writing. But write he does, managing to turn out adventures featuring characters both fictional and historical -- Sherlock Holmes, Allan Quatermain, detective Rick Ruby, and magician Harry Houdini, as well as his own new pulp adventurers, nonfiction works, and comics.

The thrill of learning was apparent as he gleefully discussed his introduction to authoring a Sherlock Holmesian-style mystery series. “I’ve found actual cases from that that time and shifted them around, sometimes geographically” to form realistic-sounding additions to the Holmes canon of stories. 

As a career electrical engineer with degrees in computational neuroscience and signal processing (don’t even ask me what those are!), Divya would seem to have more than enough background to generate her science fiction stories, which have been published in Lightspeed, Tor.com, and other magazines. “I try to start with the story idea, then go back and fill in any holes (in the science). The research must serve the story, and not the other way around.”

“When I first started writing, I wrote about things I already knew,” D’Aunno admitted. Which had to be a lot. After all, he’s an internal medicine physician to astronauts at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. 

“I knew a lot of astronauts, but it was too realistic! (Now) I don’t let the science stand in the way of my story.” 

image: wikimedia commons

“I kind of dream about the day they’ll ask me to write about something I know,” deadpanned Patterson, who has co-written with the likes of Terry Brooks, Robert Jordan, and Robert Asprin, not to mention Navy SEALs Greg McPartin (Combat Corpsman) and Craig Marley (No Lifeguard on Duty). She fills her spare time by writing short stories and humorous history essays, and working as a balloon sculptor, kayak instructor, and show horse trainer, leading me to wonder, is there anything she doesn’t know about?

If there’s stuff even this group doesn’t know, how do they manage to write about it? Sometimes the answers are something even this technophobic blogger can understand.

“Step one,” Divya said, “is to go to the library. That will sometimes take us in a different way. Have an interest in the truth of the particular story you want to write.”

“Words mean different things to different folks,” Childs-Wiley said. “How do you make you make sure you get the terminology right?”

“In science, terms are pretty well definite,” D’Aunno noted, “but general readers may not get it. Beta readers can tell you if it ‘works’. . . (Terminology) has to serve the story,” not, he said, show off the writer’s knowledge.

And for cases when the writers themselves may be unfamiliar with terminology, Divya’s take is: “It’s worthwhile to go into the children’s section of the library because there are glossaries written in easy language,” which even she admits sometimes using. 

(I’ll also add that the children’s nonfiction sections of libraries also contain books with informative pictures – great if you really need to know what something looks like.)

 What about internet research, moderator Childs-Wiley asked. “ How do you make sure a (research) source is a valid one?”

“You have to mirror the needs of the story,” D’Aunno said. “Find sources that are vetted. I serve that function a lot for other writers, as do you,” he said to Divya. “Don’t be afraid to approach more than one scientist.”

“Wikipedia is a good tool, but you must not use it as a source (for nonfiction),” Patterson said. Instead, check the sources listed by the Wikipedia article’s author. On the other hand, she pointed out that for fiction, writers don’t necessarily need to seek out primary sources, but they need to know enough “that people who do know aren’t going to call you on it.”

“I’ve found that the worst sources are people who’ve actually witnessed an event,” Porter said. “I did a book on the Beatles, and the worst sources were the Fab Four themselves, because they’ve heard so many stories regurgitated back to them.”

What if you just can’t find the information you want? Science and history are factual, but what if you’re writing fiction? “How flexible are you at bending history and science,” Childs-Wiley asked. 

“We call it hand waving,” D’Aunno said. If you’re writing science fiction set 500 years in the future, who knows what scientific knowledge will be? “(Writers) invent things. Don’t ‘hand wave’ everything, but all long as you’re consistent. . . ”  

And as Porter pointed out, “You’ve got to be internally consistent.”

“Your job,” Patterson said, “is to entertain and communicate. If you go too far, the reader isn’t going to be persuaded. You’ve got to entertain in a plausible way.”

Other suggestions for sources included YouTube. “If I’m researching a part of the world I’m not really familiar with, I can watch videos of people who actually live there,” Divya said. “You can get everything except what the air smells like.”

Porter likes Google Books, especially for “the networks and connections between books on a subject.” And Smithsonian.org. Not to mention local government offices, which often contain historical archives.

Patterson likes Google Earth and DragonCon, where she also manages the armory, “everything from stone knives to nuclear weapons.”

D’Aunno’s favorite sources also included, NASA.gov (“a lot of free images”), the Centers for Disease Control, and popular magazines such as Science News and National Geographic. 

(Note: content at all federal government websites is copyright free.)

Finally, especially for writers with long commute times, Divya likes nonfiction podcasts. “If you’re writing fiction, a lot of them will be good enough for what you’re doing.”