Wham!
Hey, uh, what does write what you know mean?
Because I don't know what it's like to be a dude and dudes generally don't know what it's like to be girls,
but we write people who aren't us all the time
So when people say that, what are they actually talking about?
Alright
Here's the thing real quick
writing and acting, they're kind of the same thing
so because I'm better at acting than writing
Let's use that as an analogy for a minute. You can't act something you don't know
You gotta draw in your life experiences and use them to portray your characters experiences
for an example
When Scott mcNeil needed to portray the trauma of his character Duo seeing his gundam get blown up, as seen here
*On the screen* Noooooooooo!
He drew on the similar experience of his wife accidentally backing her Sedan over his motorcycle
[yikes noise] I feel you bro
point is you can map your existing experiences to more alien ones
few of us have had their personal giant robots blown up in front of them
But most of us have had important things broken in the past and the feeling is much the same
personal anecdote time
Last year I attended a voice acting panel thing run by David Vincent
he played this guy
and among other things a few of us got to try our hand at doing a little onstage reacting on hypothetical situations, including death scenes
now none of us had died before but the more interesting voice stuff was before the dying
so that wasn't really a problem
I got challenged to provide the voice of someone who just got splashed with acid, set on fire
And then fell out a window
now I hadn't technically done any of those things
Except for the fire part
Protip superglue and cotton don't mix
but it wasn't too hard to imagine getting hit with something and rapidly realizing I needed to get it off me immediately
think spider falling on your face
and the falling out of a window part
I mean, I tripped over stuff, and I jumped off of high places before combining the two emotions wasn't that hard
*Red making dying noises*
*Dude* Awesome! Awesome! *Applause*
And it was pretty fun
so in acting you kind of build up a repertoire of things you understand and can recreate
fill in the blanks with your imagination and do your best
Now, the trick is in writing write what you know is this
it doesn't mean only write what you've lived through,
it means drawing what you understand to make your story
You might not know what it's like to be a half Selkie college student
But you might know what it's like to be torn between two cultural heritage's and or two families that never interact
You're probably not a highly-trained government assassin questioning their choice of career
But the odds are good that you've done unpleasant or boring work out of habit while mentally distancing yourself from your situation
But there are, you know, limits
if you're writing a job or background that hasn't really existed in reality you can play around?
But if you are writing from reality it's harder to justify doing that
if you have no background in science writing a science fiction story is liable to be difficult
if you're not familiar with a certain culture you might not want to write a story set in that culture without doing your research
So let's talk about doing your research
because the cool thing about writing what you know is that you can always know more
One of the many fabulous things about the internet is how easy it is to learn stuff through it
not only that you also get personal anecdotes from people from all over the place with all kinds of backgrounds
if you have no idea what it's like to be adjective in place,
You can find someone and ask
or, like if you've never had a certain job you can find accounts from people who have worked that job
I am 100% not a redditor, but I'll routinely scroll through ask reddit
because the sheer volume of life experiences there is amazing
and super useful when you're writing a world building and all the more scientific kind of things you can self teach to a certain degree,
but you can also ask people who do this stuff for a living
another personal anecdote for you in a Sci-Fi world?
I was working on I decided I wanted to make genetically engineered photosynthetic humans now obviously
I don't know anything about genetic engineering so I decided to hand wave the specifics of the genetic modification because that didn't strike me as
story relevant
But what was important was knowing how much?
[oxygen] the skin based photosynthesis would produce I wanted to know how well this character could function in a low oxygen
[environment] because that was potentially plot relevant
So I looked up how much oxygen a square inch of photosynthesizing plant life could produce
I approximated the surface area of the average [human] with a little help from Google
And [I] looked up how much oxygen the average human consumes in an hour. [I] found that in order to make it work
I need to increase the efficiency of the photosynthesis by a factor of [about] 24 for a photosynthesizing human to get all the oxygen
They needed if they allowed their entire surface area to be exposed to sunlight
But this was fine because I could hand wave that to so that was ok until [I] remembered that photosynthesis also produces glucose
So I looked up how many molecules of glucose are produced per molecule of oxygen during
Photosynthesis compared the amount I gotten from my previous calculation to the amount of human body used in an hour and ended up discovering that
Photosynthesis produces four times as much glucose as a human body can consume that's obviously bad
But also interesting it meant I needed to figure out a way for these
Photosynthetic people to sequester or expel excess glucose and therefore avoid the curse of space diabetes
And [it'd] have been easy to just say he photosynthesizes shine a sun lamp in his room
But this produced a much more [in] [depth] story element and one that feels more real and I had no idea about any [of] this
Stuff when I started I mean the last time I took a chem class was high school, and I didn't do very well
But I can multiply like a champ and my googling skills are second to none
So it wasn't too hard to scrape together enough actual science to construct a viable thing not real life viable
but Magic space future viable yeah
You know what I mean. Point is, it's better to do the research than it is to assume
You know enough about what you're talking about, [so] instead of write what you know it should really be know what you write
Like all good things these days there [is] controversy here
see when you're writing characters it pays to include realistic levels of Diversity or
Unrealistic levels who cares making all your characters the same is a risky endeavor because it's kind of gonna be boring no matter what you do.
But here's the problem: you can't be all those people. you can't have a background Beyond the one you have.
So how do you Reconcile including a diverse menagerie [of] characters with the fact that you can't be writing what you know in the process. [oh]
Well, there are a few schools of thought the first option is to not include diversity
You know just in case you offend someone this is [a] response to the second option where to add diversity you include
...stereotypes. unsurprisingly neither of these really reap the benefits of writing diversity into your character backgrounds and neither is ideal the third option is to
Include diversity, but to never address it. so, like, write a black character
But never really discuss the effects her being black has on her life. write in a gay character
But don't really comment on it. This is a safe option kind of in fact
It's got its own problems because although you're reskinning these characters to fit into a minority you're not exploring the actual
Consequences of being a member of that minority [and] that's the point of this option because presumably you're doing this because you yourself are not
A member of that minority and don't trust yourself to be able to [accurately] represent it
[you] risk falling back into option [two] basically an example of this is the
Ambiguously brown trope where you want to include diversity, but you don't really want to specify what it is
You know just in case now option 4 is
...research. you want to include a character in a certain group, you talk to people from that group. again,
this is writing what you know by
Expanding what you know and this one's done less because it's frankly way harder to get right, but again the internet makes it easier
There's an unprecedented level of communication where you can just see into someone else's life
It's not going to be perfect, and it's not going to be as in-depth as if you were that person living their life
but it's probably better than nothing now the
Controversy here is which of these options is better most people agree that [two] is pretty terrible
But between 1 3 & 4 it's a closer race. one is basically staying in your lane and the arguments for that tend to be
That since the author can't do it right they shouldn't try or has the potential to prove some of the most realistically diverse stories
but the typical counter-argument is that it runs the risk of
Appropriation or even telling a story that isn't yours to tell. 3 is kind of intent to strike a happy medium
But as a result gets blasted for not doing enough in either direction. Where do I stand in all of this I?
Try to avoid this problem because I don't have a solution
[there's] a reason why most of the time I write fantasy or far-future Sci-Fi because in those cases
I can construct all parties involved
It's not a question of being uneducated on real elements because there's next no input from our reality
[but] if I had to pick I'd probably try option four. whatever. It's not my call
It's just good to understand that there actually is controversy around this subject
But so far we've talked about characters and settings to make a story you also need a plot
so what does write what you know mean in the context of a plot and
not a whole lot turns out see when you break it down most stories map to things almost everyone has experienced.
you had friendships and betrayals romances or lack thereof
Pinning all your hopes on something and having it disappoint you, all kinds of stuff. [in] fact the idea that you wouldn't understand his story
Is almost alien because there are universal experiences most stories are built out of. this hardly seems like a problem, really. well....
The problem is sometimes they write what they know too well,
and as much as I love tropes you can't build a story out of them look we all grow up with entertainment
We see or read stories, and we learn them. We we know them
So when the time comes for us to write a story a lot of the time we build it out of stories
We already know, and that's the problem. It's like you're writing a book with autocomplete turned on. look, tropes aren't bad.
tropes just happen. if you're writing a story familiar things are going to show up
But there's a difference between recognizing tropes and building with them. the hero archetype
Just happened, but if you're writing a hero, he's gonna be way blander than any of the original hero archetypes, and yeah
It's Gonna be a heat.
Here, i'll give you an example. There's this series
I read when I was a kid called the belgariad and it's [well-written]
And I've got a soft spot for Generic fantasy so I liked it
But the main character Garion is the most generic instance of the hero archetype
I've ever seen. you can literally check off all the instances of his hero's journey without fail.
Now this is pretty clearly the result of building from tropes and the end result is that Garion is by far the least interesting part of
The Belgariad. this is the hero you right when you think "I know how heroes work
They have these characteristics and do these things" [and] that's... not...
Memorable. but if you want to look at a character who fits the hero archetype while still managing to be vastly entertaining I wish to
Draw your attention to [young adult] [protagonist] percy Jackson
I've complained about those books before but I have no complaints about their hero percy is one of the most entertaining protagonists
I've ever read, but his heroism isn't [what] makes him interesting
It's the constant state of near panic disorientation that makes him fun
He does heroic things,
But the First-person perspective helps us see how screamingly unprepared he is when he does those things
[Percy] Wasn't Written to be a hero
He was written to be a teenager in over his head, and it's great!
And that's the point! the hero archetype appeared [within] his character
But it's not what he is
Riordan wrote Percy as young and dyslexic with ADD [attention deficit disorder] because he knew those things from his own son
He wrote what he knew from life. Not what he knew from stories, and that produced better stories, so yeah, writin' what you know.