Know Jack #471 Well, What Do You Know

The exhortation to “write what you know” requires a writer to do two things. Some creative thinking and a lot of research. From across the room, writing looks a lot like scrolling Facebook or plain old daydreaming. From this side of the laptop, it’s work.

Creative thinking is more than dreaming up monsters. It’s introducing your creations into true-to-life situations with a plausible explanation of how they got there. It may not be advice a parent should give, but on more than one occasion, I told my children that if they were going to lie, the lie had to make sense. I later found the same is true for fiction writers.

Some years ago, I wrote a story about a rougarou (werewolf) in a small town. Several chapters into the book, I was really enjoying my rougarou creating havoc for the local sheriff. Suddenly, the thought came to me, “why now? why here? why these people?”. I write by the seat of my pants, so these were not things plotted out ahead of time

I realized a real sheriff would ask those questions. I had to come up with believable answers or the story was reduced to splatter. Some people like that kind of thing. I was an ER nurse for years and like B.B. King sang, “The Thrill is Gone”. The lie called for some creative thinking. It had to make sense.

This may be where Ed Landry took on a life of his own. He answered the questions logically and came up with a unique solution of his own. I learned to listen to him.

Unless you deal with voodoo spells, poison dart tree frogs, Sasquatch legends, shape-shifters, Baba Yaga, or sin eaters on a regular basis, research is a must for every writer. Research is one of the means by which every writer expands what he knows. For a writer, there is no such thing as useless information. I’ve even read Joe Biden quotes.

Experience is another avenue of research. Go places and do things. On my first trip to New Jersey. I stumbled upon something called the Devil Tree and had to have my picture taken with it. I haven't written about it yet. But it’s now cataloged among the things I know. Maybe on the next trip, the Pine Barrens and the Jersey Devil. Because of what I write, I go to every haunted, mysterious site I can find. I’ve been on Bigfoot hunts, and gone to haunted hospitals, music studios, battlefields, even a children’s playground. I’ve never seen a ghost or the elusive cryptid, but I got a sense of what those locations might look like.

Write what you know, it still works.