Unfortunately, “write what you know” is sometimes the first piece of advice new writers receive and one they hear and read ad nauseum as they develop their craft. I think it’s terrible advice because if you only write what you know, sooner or later (“very soon” in my case) you’ll run out of things to write about.
Instead, I dispense this advice: Write what you know and what you can find out.
The additional phrase invites infinite possibilities. When Sam Cooke laments, “Don’t know much about history, don’t know much biology,” and goes on to declare all the other topics where he’s deficient, he also states he’s willing to learn (“be an A student”) so he can win the love of another. So too can you learn all kinds of cool things and win your readers’ love.
While speaking to book clubs and talking to potential buyers I’m trying to convert into fans of my work, I encounter two types of readers: a small minority who just want to escape into the same kind of story over and over and the vast majority who want to learn new things, discover surprising aspects of life, and encounter unexpected people and situations.
In none of my books do I present prosaic settings with characters from banal backgrounds doing commonplace things. I want the settings, people, and situations to be interesting and out of the ordinary, because these aspects engage readers’ attention.
Even if you’re writing about a modern American urban, suburban, or rural setting, you can put your characters in uncommon environments. In my new suspense-thriller Watch What You Say, the larger settings are those modern US milieus. However, much of the suspense takes place in the studio of a web radio station, where interviewer extraordinaire Bo Riccardi is applying all her communication skills to try to keep her kidnapped husband alive. The other unusual locale is the tiny room dubbed The Vault, where the kidnapper has imprisoned her husband. There’s a good chance most people don’t know about the medium of web radio nor have sat in such a studio: a new environment with opportunities to learn about unusual things. Although I hope no readers have ever been held against their will, The Vault offers a terrifyingly different atmosphere that one can learn about from a safe remove.
How did I acquire knowledge about web radio? I did interviews in-studio, on the phone, and via Skype. The technology setups are inexpensive and barebones, as are the offices in which these studios are located. Web radio is democratizing the spread of information, opinion, and entertainment. Lots of people listen to podcasts, but they probably don’t consider from where these originate or how they’re created.
Adding in the live component—where viewers can see and hear what’s happening in real time—increases tension, as does the fact that anything going wrong could be viewable for posterity. All this creates an environment that engages the reader, and I didn’t know about any of it until I started doing interviews in that medium a few years ago.
I learned about kidnapping and what it does to the victim as well as the abductor by reading case studies, listening to interviews, and doing other research. The same goes for the gift of chromesthesia I gave to Bo, which makes her a stellar listener but becomes as much of a curse as a blessing after her husband is kidnapped. I don’t experience any forms of synesthesia (blended senses), but I know people who do, and books, articles, interviews, and more helped me with my explorations. Along the way, I’ve viewed artwork created by chromesthetes, read about chefs who taste shapes, and talked to people who associate different colors and personalities with letters and numbers. My job became synthesizing the synesthesia so it remained cool and interesting to readers without distracting them from the story.
And that last part—deciding what to include and what to leave out—is as important as doing the research itself. You can always tell when authors regard every morsel they’ve unearthed as precious, because they bog down their story with facts. If your hero is escaping through the sewers, don’t interrupt this with a lecture on the history of those sewers or a discourse on sanitation engineering. I don’t care if you spent months on all that research so you could create credible scenes; it doesn’t belong in your story. If you must, paste that minutiae on your website in a bonus section, to reward those who want to know more.
It’s easy to convey excitement and interest when you write about what you’ve found out. The energy you bring to this will hook your readers, too. Then it’s time to learn some new things for your next book and give your fans another novel experience!