Writing What Your Audience Knows

There are some misconceptions behind the idea of ‘write what you know.’ Anytime you’re writing sci-fi/fantasy, you’re writing about imaginary people, places, and things. So, how can you be writing what you know when telling such stories? Even if you’re an architect, when it comes to world building for your story, you will encounter subject areas that are outside of your expertise.

Instead, I think it should be viewed as ‘writing what your audience knows,’ because that’s where you lose readers.

I read an account of a writer crafting a story about sailors, and while it was enjoyed by non-sailors, actual sailors hated it. And the reasoning is that the piece didn’t represent their job, their lingo, or much of anything that made them feel as though the story was about them.

There is a fix for this though. You don’t have to be a sailor to write about sailors. The simple answer is research. If you take the time to learn about what you’re trying to depict...by the time you start writing, you will indeed be ‘writing what you know.’ And doing so will mean your story is approachable for the sailors in the aforementioned scenario.

I’ve experienced the plight of these sailors firsthand. With my background as a helicopter pilot, if a helicopter shows up in a movie, I expect it to crash or for some flight aspect to be depicted wrong. Sometimes I get both! And let me tell you, I’m surprised my pupils haven’t gotten stuck in an upright direction considering how much eye rolling I’ve been known to do.

I’ve witnessed the same thing in peers. I’ve worked alongside police officers, medical personnel, and firefighters. It doesn’t matter what specialty is being represented, if tasks or procedures are portrayed poorly or outright wrong, there’s a universal groan that all technical experts tend to unleash. And I think medical personnel have it the roughest. If you were to suggest your ventilator—breathing apparatus—was providing some sort of heart information... Yeah, you’re going to lose some of your audience.

So, do yourself a solid; research uses and procedures when you’re depicting some technical field within your story.

The more central a technical expertise is to your plot or protagonist, the more you’ll need to know. If you’re story follows a firefighter, you’re going to want to dive into the ins-and-outs of their daily lives. But if your protagonist interacts with firefighters in some way, there’s far less you’ll need to know. Just learn enough to depict them realistically. Granted, you won’t know what ‘realistic’ looks like, so look into multiple firefighter accounts for whatever event you’re trying to depict.

On the Writing Craft

Something that I think goes unconsidered with this topic is your actual writing. You’re telling your story through your writing and if you’re writing know-how is suffering in some way, you’re unwittingly writing what you know. More specifically, you’re writing what you don’t know.

I think most readers of this type article will be writers or those aspiring to write. With that in mind, don’t forget to put time and attention into the quality of your work. Something else that I’ve seen firsthand is the process of transposing your imagination onto the page in a way so that a reader can gain an approximation of your original idea.

Most of the time, when you write something, then read your writing, your mental depiction isn’t based on the words in your writing; you’re replaying the scenario that already existed in your mind when you began the writing. And this situation is why it’s typically advised that you wait a while between drafting and revising.

Great writing isn’t accidental.

Something universally agreed on is that your writing has to be grammatically accurate. That’s not debatable. But outside of that, there additional elements like tone, style, themes, literary devices, point of view, and so on.

If you want others to take your writing seriously, you’ll need to take the craft aspect of it seriously too. That means more research. So, dig into the different aspects of the craft. Look at the writing of other professionals that are highly regarded and try to understand what it is they’re doing. If you’ve heard a writer’s name, that’s likely due to more than their ability to tell a compelling story. There may very well be things in their writing that makes them stand out.

So, go discover what that is!

And until the next one, happy reading/writing!

JT