Writing What You Don't Know

One of the enduring pieces of advice writers are given is "Write what you know". There's a lot of sense to that -- a British veterinarian named James Herriot made a second career writing memoirs of his cases as a country vet. (The first was titled "All Creatures Great and Small", and I loved it as a child.) Ernest Hemingway wrote about taciturn, disaffected males drinking and doing manly things like going off to war. Hemingway wrote what he knew, although he didn't write enough cats into the plot.  Laurell Hamilton writes about vampires and werewolves in St. Louis -- I have second thoughts about going to St. Louis now.

I would argue that writers incorporate what we know into our stories, but that our stories contain more than what we know. Otherwise they'd be called autobiographies. And, face it, life so often doesn't have a clear plot. ("Day 3: Push cat off the kitchen table. Day 4: Push cat off the kitchen table." Of course, I just got a great idea for a short story in which the cat trains their human to push them off the kitchen table daily as a form of exercise to save the human's life.)

The thing with writing what you don't know is that it requires research. I remember reading a Jayne Ann Krentz (romance) novel set in wine country. In one section, the male protagonist walks through his successful winery supervising the process. That's about all the detail this scene provided, and that frustrated me. I've toured several wineries in my life and at one point considered running a small winery in Northwest Missouri. A winery has a production room with big metal or plastic vats and a concrete floor, spacious and white and silver. There's a small, glass-windowed lab nearby where must can be tested for sugar level (brix) and wine can be tested for pH and alcohol level.  For big oaky red wines, racks several feet tall hold barrels of wine for aging. There's a bottling setup where bottles flow down an assembly line to be filled, capped, and labeled. The crushers and destemmers sit outside, where in season they'll prepare grapes into must.

The point here is that, if you are going to incorporate what you don't know into a story, you have to research it. First, as I point out above, readers who know more about the topic than you do will get annoyed at the lack of detail or at wrong details. Second, details can enhance your plot -- when I researched the all-night pierogi place on the Stare Misto in Krakow, I got to put in a running joke about a featured dish with an odd name -- "Krakow Misalliance" (salmon and potato pancakes, actually). This became not only a symbolic reflection of the misalliance of the antagonists, but later becomes a password that proves the identity of one of the characters.

How to research? I have to admit I spend a lot of time googling. Google and wikipedia won't help me write a research paper, but they are invaluable in pinpointing details that I want to put in a book. There's still room for a little substitution -- I found a perfect place in Michigan for a future plot twist, but the cabin there is a bit nicer than I'd like, so I have to downgrade it a little in my writing. (I'm also a stickler for detail -- the writers for the old TV show The Pretender admitted to creating a Greek Goddess and a deadly virus, while I would have looked up an appropriate goddess and studied the Marburg virus for consideration in the plot.)

I would love to travel to do some research, and I know I can use it as a tax writeoff, but on a professor's salary I'm not getting to Karlskrona any time soon. Maybe someday.