Last year, in a post titled, “Writing Novels For Fun And…Fun?” I made the following observation:

When I made the commitment to start writing novels a long, long time ago I began by sticking to one of the basic tenets: Write what you know. I knew Edgar Rice Burroughs, Lin Carter, Robert E. Howard, John Norman, Otis Adelbert Kline, among others, and my first thirteen published books (and a few unpublished) reflected this influence. Nothing wrong with that; it’s a good way to get started. (But so is writing what you DON’T know, and even writing what you WANT to know—potential topics for a future post, maybe.)

Indeed. As Egg Shen said in Big Trouble in Little China, it’s time to collect. The future is now, so let’s talk about writing what you know…or don’t know…or want to know.

Using my 2012 horror/ghost story, The Burning Ground, as a reference point, I’ll start by saying that I not only knew the genre, but I totally enjoyed it. I read Stephen King, Richard Matheson, Peter Straub, and other spinners of ghostly yarns for much of my life. So when I decided to write The Well, my first horror story, in the early ’80s it seemed a natural, as did the three subsequent novels: Demon Shadows, Fire Dance, and The Burning Ground.

But is just knowing the genre enough? No way, because there are so many more elements to a riveting novel, whatever its genre. In The Burning Ground I open the story during the California Gold Rush, and while I knew a little bit about that event, I didn’t know all that much, and in order to make scenes and settings believable I needed to do extensive research—which I loved doing, and which, I feel, brought the beginning of the story to life.

I did even more research on the Maidu, a small Native American tribe in the Sierra Nevada foothills whose numbers were violently decimated during the Gold Rush. How did this begin? Because I have always found it fascinating to learn about America’s indigenous people, so this began as something I wanted to know. What I subsequently learned about this tribe—their interaction with the whites who overran their land, their burial customs, their legends, etc.—fit in perfectly with the story that I wanted to tell.

Bottom line: writing what you know is a great starting point. But creating a story that will make readers want to turn the pages (I call that narrative thrust) requires so much more. And keep this in mind: if you’ve done your research well, then by the time your story is done you WILL know what you didn’t know or wanted to know at the start.

What I truly believe people mean when they say, “Don’t write what you don’t know” is, “Don’t write what you don’t want to read,” or even, “Don’t write what you think might sell.” I speak from first-hand experience about this. Years ago, when I was writing sword & sorcery, sword & planet, and adventure fantasy stories (all genres that I loved), I became frustrated at earning little money and decided to write what was selling: romance novels. At that point I’d never read one in my life, so I forced myself to read a few—forced—before starting out. What resulted in a few proposals was 100% unadulterated CRAP. I gave that up real quick.

                                     IN HER SHADOW

When talking about writing what you know I offer one of my writers, dear friend August McLaughlin. Once an international runway model, August has written freely about her past battles with anorexia and other eating disorders on her excellent blog. In her psychological thriller, In Her Shadow, the reality of her experiences is manifested in the demons that haunt her two main protagonists, both of whom suffer from debilitating eating disorders. While there is so much more to this powerful novel, it is this one element, drawn from something that August knows all too well, which makes it so memorable.

THE YEAR OF DUROCHER

My most recent writer to find success is Dr. Theodore Jacobs, a New York City psychiatrist. His novel, The Year of Durocher, published last month by International Psychoanalytic Books, is a coming-of-age story that I totally related to (no, not because I needed a shrink), as it involved growing up in NYC during the middle of the last century, lots of baseball and other sports references, a father-and-son relationship, and more. It became clear to me early on that Ted was writing what he knew, since I knew it pretty well too, so I recognized that he was spot on. And while Jonathan Manheim is Ted’s Holden Caulfield in this romp through an era, it is a minor character—Jonathan’s best friend, Mel Schleifer—that is arguably my favorite. Mel, you see, is Jonathan’s guru, his maven, his amateur shrink, if you will. Hmm, I wonder from where Ted Jacobs drew that character…? Highly recommended—and a great example of writing what you know.

SWORDS & SPECTERS: two free Kindle downloads coming up. On Friday, March 29^th, it’s my sword & sorcery novel, The Sword of Tyron, and on Saturday, March 30^th, travel to another dimension in The Shrouded Walls of Kharith (Ro-lan: Book Two). Enjoy!