You have a great idea for your novel. You’ve developed the characters with good complex relationships over weeks. You know the two or three themes that the novel will explore.. And you have the perfect location for it, the Aegean Sea, bordered by Greece in the west and Turkey in the east with Crete not very far to the South, and the mysterious Bulgaria and Macedonia just north of northern Greece, it is the perfect climate and perfect atmosphere to develop your book.
There’s only one problem. You’ve never been to the Aegean Sea.
Oh, you’ve read about it a little bit, seen it in some movies and have always been attracted to it. But you don’t know its islands in detail, its mysteries, its secrets and intricacies. Should you go forward and write about the novel using the Aegean, as the locale for your story?
Absolutely not. Even though your characters are wonderful and you’ve got very good plot layout, you don’t know the area and therefore you can’t really bring all the area’s features into your writing. You don’t know what islands lie in the Aegean Sea. You don’t know what life is like on those islands. You don’t know what political intrigues are occurring between Greece and Turkey and how they affect daily life there. You don’t know what it’s like in the rain. You don’t know how expensive it is to live on its northern coast.
All of these things are useful information and knowledge for developing not just background information, but more importantly, generating your sense of the area. It is your appreciation and comfort with the scene that the reader is attuned to. If the sense is good, then the reader relaxes.
Bottom line–you have to do your homework.
If there’s a topic that you know well for your novel, then you draw on that knowledge, as long as the knowledge is current. But if it’s an area you don’t know well, you can’t pretend that you know it and write a novel. Not only will it limit your ability to write effectively about it, your writing will be inauthentic to a knowledgeable reader. As I said in an earlier post, one of the great difficulties I had in writing, Saving Grace, is that one of the protagonists was an alcoholic father who was trying to take care of his ill daughter. Try as I might, it was a toughest part of the book I wrote, because I had not been an alcoholic, and not been raised by alcoholics. So even though I treated them in clinics and hospitals, I never observed the relationship between an alcoholic parent or their son or daughter. Therefore, the writing was stilted. Could I have repaired this? Yes. I could have spent time learning about them. I could have spent time talking with alcoholics, observing them with their children. I could have spoken with counselors. This was available to me.
Before writing Catching Cold – Judgment, I spend quite a bit of time learning about chemical and molecular machines, i.e., molecules that can be induced to carry out functions in our cells. I don’t have a background in this field, but I was very interested in studying it, so I spent weeks learning about these amazing devices. And when I got to the point where I understood how they performed, I was able to write in a fluid fashion about what these molecular machines could. This was the scientific backbone of the book.
Sometimes writing about what you don’t have an innate understanding of can be controversial. There are. concerns among people and reviewers who now disdain the efforts of white authors to right about black people, or lesbians to write about gay men, or straight people who write about transgender people. And in fact, books can be rejected or accepted by literary agents and publication houses based solely on the difference between the demographic and cultural characteristics of the author and the novel’s protagonist. If they are too far apart, then the book can be rejected prima facie. This is a sad and unfortunate turn of events. What matters in a book is the quality of writing, not how different the protagonist is from the author. And the quality of writing is bound up with your understanding of the protagonist. A black person can write about white people if the black author has done the work to understand them, to know their motivations, and the guiding principles of the white person about which they’re writing. If the research isn’t done, and the book is simply a description of a stereotypical white person, then that book is going to fail, not because it’s a black author and a white subject, but because the author did not do the research they needed to do to understand their subject and therefore, the writing is bad.
And by the way, people can be part of group and not understand the group to which we belong. We are all human, yet who among can say they understand humanity?
One of the themes in Catching Cold – Redemption is a lesbian relationship between an attorney and the target of that attorney’s investigation. One of the first things I had to realize was that I did not come with knowledge of lesbianism baked in. I had to first understand the nature of this relationship before I could write clearly and helpfully about it. And once I understood that the basis of the lesbian relationship was love between people, I was able to have that be the level at which I could write the scene. The homework paid off in opening my door to greater understanding.
I would encourage you as an author to let the sky be your only limit in writing. Choose the characters that you think will work and the scenes on which their actions take place, There is no legitimate reason to exclude yourself from one writing about one demographic group because you happen to be in another. However, there is an inescapable reason about learning clearly what the demographics, personality, and characteristics are of the person that you’re writing about, so that you can reflect accurately and make them come alive in your novel.
