Consider What We know
We know that we are people. We know what it means to breathe, eat, drink, sleep and dream. We share these qualities with every single person living on the planet. Other human qualities are often considered gifts; that we can see, hear, talk, walk, run, etceteras, but these are gifts shared by billions of people as well.
The bottom line is, we share with every single human being the knowledge of what it means to be human. Because we are writing a story that involves characters that are human (or some variation thereof) we are starting with an already large base of knowledge!
What if you want to write science fiction, or fantasy or horror? The entities in these stories are often not human. They are monsters, aliens, fairies and ghosts. If you look at these entities carefully, you will find that they are largely founded on the human condition, and that’s where you start.
Let’s use ghosts as an example. They are the spirits of people who once lived who haunt the living. I have never met a ghost and don’t know that they actually exist. But I know what it means to have lived. I have never died, but unfortunately I know what it means to have someone I know die. I know it’s an unfortunate reality that everyone will someday die and that is something we commonly fear as a society. If I am a religious person, then I believe the soul exists after our corporal bodies pass on. I know that ghosts exist in literature and in other entertainment mediums.
So, no, I’ve never actually experienced a ghost in real life, but I know of ghosts. I have knowledge of ghosts through empirical means. I know them from reading about them, watching movies about them, from my personal fear of life, or no life, after death, and of course, my fear of death itself. Religions speak of spirits as do Shakespeare and Dickens. Ghosts are a huge part of our societal mythos and I have had knowledge of ghosts since I was a small child, and because of all this knowledge, I can write about ghosts.
And This Is Fiction!
You are creating a universe of which your are the god. There are no facts to follow. OK, not necessarily–however, don’t dismiss that. It’s an important part of the creative process. It’s a part novelists sometimes forget. Here’s why. We get so stuck on getting the facts right that we forget that we have the power to manipulate the facts to fit our universe. The key to doing this successfully is knowing how much to reveal and how much to conceal in the story.
Controlling the Facts
You want to write a murder mystery. Every murder mystery needs a character that will solve the crime. Common crime solvers include police officers, detectives, forensic scientists and reporters. These people are experts in their fields and may play a large role in your novel. But you were never a police officer, detective, forensic scientist or reporter. You have no actual knowledge of what it means to be these professionals. You’ve seen them on TV and read about them in books. You’ve seen Horatio Caine on CSI Miami take that little cotton swab of DNA and put it into a little plastic tube then snip off the end of the swab later and put it in another contraption that spins around really fast and viola! DNA is identified! But what that contraption is and how it defines the DNA you really don’t know.
So now you’re thinking you’ve got some research to do, and it better be specific research through reliable sources, and when you’ve got your answers, they better be accurate. Even if you do the research, does that mean it will be enough for you to create a believable character that is a forensic scientist? It all depends on what role this scientist plays in your story.
I said you are the god of your universe and that means you have the power to pick and choose how much focus each character in your story gets. If you want believable characters and a believable story, you need to know when NOT to get the facts wrong. It takes a scientist years of advanced college training and interning to come to know what you are trying to learn in just a couple of months. So to have this forensic scientist be your main character is illogical. By limiting the amount of input the scientist actually has in the story, you don’t have to worry about the facts. He is only there to move the story forward and not as the story’s main focus.
Do You Really Need a Forensic Scientist
Stephen King uses sheriffs a lot in his stories. Cujo, Misery, Needful Things, The Dark Half all have sheriffs, not CSI, but small town sheriffs. He knows about small town sheriffs because he lives in real life in a small town with a sheriff. His sheriffs are not the main characters of his story. He only brings in the sheriffs long enough to move the action forward and aid in solving the crime. He uses his empirical knowledge of the overall workings of the sheriff without having to worry about the details.
Yet you say you really want your main character to be a forensic scientist. Ask yourself why. Is it really important that the scientist be the main focus? Your answer may be that scientists are more exciting than receptionists. Really?
Let’s look again at Stephen King. Carrie is just a teenage girl from a small town in Maine. Small town girl, boring, blah! She’s bullied, just like so many other high school girls who aren’t pretty enough to be cheerleaders or smart enough to be popular. There’s nothing interesting about boring Carrie, teenage girl. Except she has telekinetic powers, her mother’s a psycho and she burns down her school gymnasium with everyone in it on prom night.
There’s nothing interesting about failed writer Jack Torrence living in an empty hotel. He’s so boring he’s a writer who can’t even write anything interesting. He’s middle aged and alcoholic with a boring wife and son. There’s nothing exciting about him except his son is clairvoyant and the empty hotel he’s living in is actually a psychic entity that possesses weak, boring people like Jack Torrence and turns them into psychotic killers.
King starts by assessing what he knows, then expands upon that. That is your goal as a writer.
Location - Same Thing
You want to set your location in Brazil. Why? Because, you say, "Small Town", America is boring. You want to set your story in an exciting location, not an everyday location. Brazil is exotic and you don’t remember reading a lot of novels set in Brazil, so it will be different and fresh.
But you’ve never been to Brazil. You don’t have tangible knowledge of it. You could do research, but will that help you with the subtleties of the surroundings or the nuances of the culture. What about Brazil is so important that your novel must be placed there? Is it simply because you think it will be more interesting than Small Town, America? Here’s a fact. Interesting things happen everywhere in the world. It’s not the place that matters, but what happens in that place.
Castle Rock (Bangor), Maine is a small town, except in Stephen King’s town the devil owns the curiosity shop in the center. Or in another story it’s being overrun by vampires. In another, a boring dog gets bitten by a bat and starts tearing everyone apart in a rabid rage. You get the idea.
Conclusion
Go ahead. Write what you know, because you know a lot more than you think!
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