“Write what you know.”

Really? What about when we need to write about a relationship with which we have no experience, or about a real-world location to which we’ve never been? How do we go about writing what we most explicitly do NOT know?

Dan discusses writing about a sociopathic teenager in a mortuary. Howard covers writing about the relationships in a close-knit military organization. We talk about research, extrapolation, and talking to friends who have had the experiences we lack. But what separates the amateur from the master in this regard?

We talk about all this at length, discussing our own experiences, where we’ve fallen short, where we’ve excelled, and what we’ve done to close the gap. Because we are, of course, masters, and in this regard it’s EASY for us to talk about what we know.

Audiobook Pick-of-the-Week: Mr. Monster, by Dan Wells. This is the sequel to Dan’s first book, I Am Not a Serial Killer. While it is less bloody than the first, it is far, far more disturbing.

Writing Prompt: Watch Ian McKellen explain how to act. Many of you may have already seen this, but watch it again. Then let it inspire you…

This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by Audible.
Visit http://AudiblePodcast.com/excuse for a free trial membership*.
*Note: From the Audible website, here are the terms of the free membership. Read the fine print, please!

Audible® Free Trial Details
Get your first 14 days of the AudibleListener® Gold membership plan free, which includes one audiobook credit. After your 14 day trial, your membership will renew each month for just $14.95 per month so you can continue to receive one audiobook credit per month plus members-only discounts on all audio purchases. A very small number of titles are more than one credit. Cancel your membership before your free trial period is up and you will not be charged. Thereafter, cancel anytime, effective the next billing cycle. Any unused audiobook credits will be lost at cancellation.

Powered by RedCircle

Transcript

As transcribed by Mike Barker

Key Points: Write what you know? But what if I don’t know, but other people do? Find elements that are familiar, that you have in common. Find the familiar and build on it. Extrapolate. Research. Make your character an individual. Write what you know in great detail, and then explain lightly the parts you don’t know. Write your story, then ask an alpha reader who knows the missing part for help.

[Brandon] All right. So. There is classic writing advice which states, “Write what you know.” This is very… a little difficult to follow, as we talked about in our genres, where we are writing lots of stuff that nobody knows about. I actually wanted to do a podcast this time though about writing the unfamiliar, writing things you don’t know but which other people do. In other words, we’re not going to talk about writing about strange worlds in this one and convincing people that they’re real. How do you write about being in a relationship if you’ve never been in one of this sort? Or how do you write about being in a location many of your readers may have been, but you haven’t been? Dan, before we started this podcast, you mentioned that the write-what-you-know piece of advice is something you kind of have an issue with?
[Dan] Yes. I think that that is good advice, to a point, but bad advice in general because people interpret it far too broadly. I think when people hear write what you know, they think, “Oh, well, then that means I have to write about a person who lives in my town and goes to my school and has my job and… no. That would be boring. Then we would never have any science fiction books or fantasy books or anything like that. For example, my books… they are about a teenage sociopath. I am not a sociopath. He works in a mortuary. I have never worked in a mortuary. There’s all kinds of unfamiliar elements in that book. But what makes it work is that I took that cool character and that cool idea and found all of the elements with which I am familiar and with which I do have experience.
[Howard] Well, let me ask a question. John Cleaver is… he has got one sister, is that right? One sibling? How many siblings do you have?
[Dan] I have one of each.
[Howard] You have one of each. And he comes from a broken home?
[Dan] I do not.
[Howard] You do not. So… my goodness, how do you write this?
[Dan] How on Earth did I do that? Well, for starters, I found the points we had in common. For… if you’re a teenager in America, pretty much regardless of your family situation, you are going to have some kind of angst stuff in common with other teenagers. You’re going to have that sense of isolation and uncertainty that just comes with adolescence. So finding that as common ground and building on that lets you throw all kinds of unfamiliar stuff in there without being too esoteric and unapproachable.
[Brandon] Right. I would say that finding the familiar and building upon it is the core of what we do, particularly in science fiction and fantasy where we are writing about these places that no one has ever been before. It would be easy to get completely unrelatable. I think you can do the same sort of thing in any sort of situation. But of course, being a writer is all about being able to write… be someone you’re not. So it’s hard to even explain for me how you go about doing that because I’ve practiced so long. But that’s what this podcast is about.

[Howard] One method that has worked really well for me is extrapolation. I’m writing about people who are in a very close-knit military organization. Life is on the line regularly. They have a brothers-in-arms sort of relationship that I have never had because I’ve never been in the military. Now, I say I’ve never had. I’ve never had it to that extent. I spent two years as a Mormon missionary in which I’ m thrown together with a guy I’ve never met before and the two of us are expected to do a whole lot of really hard, really tedious sorts of work and not kill each other.
[Dan] A vital aspect of any relationship.
[Howard] And those… well, but those experiences I’m able to extrapolate on to some extent to deliver part of what’s in Schlock Mercenary. I also worked in a corporate environment where I realized towards the end of my stay there… I realized that my decisions were directly impacting whether friends of mine would still have jobs at the end of the day. From that I was able to extrapolate what does it mean when you have to make a life-or-death decision. Now obviously, that’s not perfect. But extrapolating from what you already know, from what is similar, is a great way to start.

[Dan] If you don’t already know something, research is invaluable in this case. If you want to find out… for example, with my guy coming from a broken home, my parents are happily married and have been forever. But I have friends whose parents are divorced who… different kinds of dysfunctionality in a home… and just researching online. It’s a psychological book, so I read a lot of psychological texts to see what are the effects if someone grows up without a mother or without a father? How is that going to affect them?

[Brandon] I worry that we’re kind of just stating the obvious a little too much in this podcast. Yes, doing research. That’s taken for granted. The questions that keep buzzing in my head is how does… what separates the amateurs from the master in being able to do this? I’m trying to break down what I do myself. One thing that occurred to me is that… going back to the podcast where we talked about writing the opposite gender, which is a similar sort of podcast. One of the things I believe that we talked about is reinforcing that the person that you’re writing, whatever gender they are, is an individual. If you can make them live and breathe as an individual, you can convince the reader that yes, maybe it’s not this way for everyone of that gender, but it’s this way for that person. If that makes any sense. And doing that with your situations…
[Howard] That comes back to one of the very first podcasts we ever did in which Dan quoted somebody, and I don’t remember who it was, and said explain something in great detail and then explain something else in just a little bit of detail. Give us the piece that you know in fantastic detail and convince us. Make this character… for instance, you’re trying to write a girl and you’re a boy. You know a lot about fishing and she grew up fishing. She knows fishing cold. So you can explain that in great detail, and then gloss over some of the things maybe that make her a girl because she’s a fisherman first. That sort of trick can work.
[Brandon] I don’t think I can overemphasize this concept because it extrapolates quite well to a lot of what you are doing when you are writing… when you are creating this picture of things that you want to feel real even though they aren’t. In a lot of ways, we’ve talked about being the stage magician where you’re holding up the thing to attract attention while you’re not wanting them to pay attention to something else. That works very well in this situation. Make the characters real, and maybe even though you’ve never been in the type of relationship they’ve been in, if you can do enough research to find out how it would really be like, and then mix that with their individuality, and then emphasize several aspects of it that are just aspects of their personality… not saying this is how it is for everybody, this is how it is for these characters. If we believe they’re real, this is going to work. Dan, you had our book of the week this week.

[Dan] Yes. The book of the week this week is Mr. Monster by Dan Wells. The brilliant and handsome author of I Am Not a Serial Killer. This is my second book. It came out this week. Is off on audible now. If you have read my first book, it is about a teenage sociopath who encounters some supernatural menaces and has to break all of his personal rules of conduct in order to stop them. The second book is pretty much about how hard it is once you’ve broken all of your rules to go back to being a good person again. It’s less bloody than the first book, but far more disturbing. This is the book… when my mother-in-law read the manuscript, she actually secretly called my wife and asked, “Do you feel safe at home?” So… that’s the kind of book that this is.
[Howard] Yeah. I have never plowed through a book as frightened as I did through I Am Not a Serial Killer. That benchmark was blown away by Mr. Monster. I am not a big fan of horror as a genre. This doesn’t feel like a horror book to me. This feels like the scariest book of the kind that I really love to read genre. Does that make sense?
[Dan] I want to put that on the cover.
[Brandon] And I want to steer the conversation back toward the unfamiliar.
[Howard] Audiblepodcast.com/excuse, 14 day free trial.
[Dan] And a free copy of my book in electronic audio form.

[Brandon] So…
[Howard] The unfamiliar.
[Brandon] Let’s talk about the unfamiliar. Let’s talk about unfamiliar locations. Dan, you set your book in a place you have never been. Is it a real place?
[Dan] It is not a real place. But… in the sense that all little towns of America, to a certain point are identical, it is a real place. What I did for that is, I actually got my brother and we said… we live in Utah, which has a lot of small towns, and we both traveled extensively throughout midwestern America which has a lot of small towns. We just kind of wrote down what were all the major points. What makes something feel like a small town? Things like everybody knows each other, at least to a point. Things like people don’t tend to lock their doors. There’s maybe one or two large industries in the town, and everybody works for them. Little details like that, that you can throw into the background, and then people will start to believe that it’s a real place, because it feels familiar, because you’ve hit all these kind of archetype points.
[Howard] Yeah. If there’s an unfamiliar place… a place that’s unfamiliar to you but is familiar to your readers, it is likely that you’ve got Facebook friends with photo albums who have maybe been to that place. A good exercise for a writer is to look at a photograph of a place, and then try and give a textual description of that place in a way that someone who has not seen the photograph is now experiencing something.
[Brandon] Well, and this kind of comes down to the Metropolis versus New York question, right? It can be kind of bothersome to find out that the place isn’t real. It’s much less bothersome when it’s a little no-name town. In the Alcatraz books, I intentionally didn’t set it in any… I just called it the city. Which is, in a way, cheating even more than what you did because I just said, “it’s just a place in America in suburbia.” I never mentioned by name. That’s partially because it doesn’t matter to the story.
[Howard] The difference from Metropolis…
[Dan] You call that a cheat, but it’s very common. E.T. Where is E.T. set? It’s just a suburb somewhere. Because that’s the important part.
[Brandon] Where is the Simpsons set? Isn’t it the Simpsons that…
[Dan] Yeah. The Simpsons which is Springfield, and they never tell you which state it’s in.
[Howard] What I was going to say about Metropolis is that Metropolis doesn’t bother me because it’s a superhero comic. It’s a fictional universe. What bothers me is movies like The Taking of Pelham 123 or Diehard with a Vengeance in which they’re set in New York City, and my friends who live in New York City tell me, “Oh, that was so wrong. They got it all wrong. Why couldn’t they have at least tried to walk some of these paths and see what was going on. They’re making a movie for crying out loud. Somebody lives in New York.”
[Brandon] That happens a lot. It happens in fiction a lot, too. In fact, there’s one very famous author whose books I really like but I’ve heard several complaints that the city that he set his books in drives the people up the wall who live there because nothing’s accurate. So how do you avoid this? Well, I guess you can obfuscate like we said. You can do the… put it in the city. But in some cases, that just doesn’t work.
[Howard] If you’re not going to anonymize it, then write the story you want to write, with the descriptions you want to write. Then find an alpha reader who knows that city and be willing to make some corrections. I think that applies for any of the relationships we’ve talked about. You have to be willing to hand it to somebody who knows it better than you know it, and respond to the criticism appropriately.
[Dan] Well, and depending on what kind of story you’re trying to tell, you will need to focus on different aspects of your location. The Taking of Pelham 123 was literally a joke for every New Yorker that saw it because the subway system was inconceivably bizarre and had no relation to actual New York. Whereas Woody Allen movies, which are set in New York, were very… New Yorkers tend to love them because they feel like New York, they feel like this is the city I live in. Part of that is because Taking of Pelham 123 was an action movie and the blocking was far more important. How to get from point A to point B and which streets that would involve and what the traffic would be like was a big deal, and Woody Allen doesn’t have to deal with that.

[Brandon] For the last part of the podcast, let’s talk about something that I’ve actually run into a little bit. I just was doodling, starting a little short story. I wanted to make it about an attorney. I stopped, and I said, “Man, I cannot make this character sound like an attorney because I’m not an attorney and they have their own language.”
[Dan] Oh, man.
[Brandon] How do you do that? Is it the right move for me to say I am just not going to write this about an attorney? Or… what do you do?
[Howard] Let me… my dad was an attorney. Okay. My dad sounded like everybody else’s dad. He was a Harvard graduate, so he used a lot of big words, and he would smack me on the head when my grammar was wrong. But he didn’t speak in attorney speak ever. Ever! I remember going to his office. He never spoke in attorney speak. He occasionally referred to clients or contracts or liens or things like that. But attorney speak — the contractual language — only appeared on paper. So if you’re going to write about an attorney, write him like a smart person, and… yeah, use terms when it touches on what he’s doing, and don’t worry about it.
[Brandon] Well, see, the problem would be with this story is number one, it was in viewpoint. It’s very different from using an attorney, if you’re in the character’s head. Number two, it would have involved part of the day at work. You can’t get around it when part of the day is at work. At that point, I actually stopped and said, “I can’t write this.” The reason I decided was not because I didn’t think I could write it. It was because this would take a major investment on my part.
[Howard] The homework.
[Brandon] To be able to write this character right. This story cannot therefore demand enough of that time from me, so I’m going to stop right now. That may have been the wrong move. The right move may have been just to write the story anyway, and then give it to the attorney and say, “How far off am I? Where can I go and research that I can get these things right?”
[Dan] In the Serial Killer books, I ran into that problem a lot. First of all, and Brandon can attest to this, I cannot for the life of me write a believable policeman or reporter. It’s become the joke of our writing group, that they’re just abysmally awful. I also had a mortician and a therapist in the first books. The… my first pass at the therapist was wildly unbelievable. I had to go back and do a lot of research and figure out how therapists actually talk and how a therapy session goes. When I did the mortician, I tried to do some hands-on stuff and tried to do some interviews, and I couldn’t because no morticians would talk to me. I think they thought I was writing an expose or something. But what I did is just what you suggest. I went ahead and wrote it anyway with what little information I had and just tried to make the people believable. It has turned out well in the end. Morticians who read it now say that it’s more or less accurate.

[Brandon] Wow. I’m going to go ahead and end us here. I’m actually going to give us our writing prompt. It’s going to be a video writing prompt. We’re going to have Howard put it in the liner notes. It’s because this entire podcast, I’ve been thinking about this little video which cracks me up because in a lot of ways we are kind of stating the obvious, though I hope that we gave some good information. So watch what is linked and write your prompt based on something you are inspired by in that video.
[Dan] This has me terrified.
[Howard] For those of you just pulling this down to your iPhone, yes, you’re going to need to go to writingexcuses.com and pull up the actual webpage with hyperlinks on it. This involves reading.
[Brandon] You will laugh, though, when you watch this video.
[Dan] And clicking on some…
[Brandon] You’re out of excuses, now go write.