What Do Ya Know?
Published August 11th, 2009 | 
If you’re a writer, you’ve probably heard the saying, “write what you know.” And, if you’re a fiction writer, you’ve also likely heard the phrase “suspension of disbelief.” Obviously, if you write about something you don’t know unconvincingly, the reader won’t be able to suspend disbelief and won’t buy into the fictional reality you are trying to create.
This concerns me as a writer, because there’s a lot of things I don’t know about. For instance, writing a story involving a car chase would give me hives because I don’t know jack about cars. I’m embarrassed to admit that. Most men learn about cars from there fathers. Unfortunately for me, my father doesn’t know about cars either, so I didn’t learn. And, after so much time, it seems pointless to learn. So I can’t tell the difference between a Mazda 6 and a Dodge Journey. It comes down to research and providing significant detail in order to suspend disbelief. So if I were writing scene involving a car chase between a police car and a Lamborghini I’d have to know whether a police car (depending on the make and model) was capable of outrunning the sports car. One would assume not, but then again I’ve seen cop cars racing down the road and know them to be pretty darn fast. Things like how fast, how the two cars handle corner, would be things I’d probably have to know to write convincingly about a car chase.
Obviously, writing what you know, doesn’t mean you have to do everything you write about. You don’t have to be a junky to write convincingly about the drug culture. This process of knowing, starts with asking good, reasonable questions: How does this work? If I were going to do X, how would I accomplish X? If I do X, what would be the result? Things like that. You add some imagination and empathy to your pot of research and you will perhaps know just enough to make your story work.
