crispina kemp

Hands up all those who’ve heard the advice “Write what you know.”

Hands up if you thought this meant you should only include your own lived experiences in your writing.

Example: You’re a married accountant, so you’re going to write about the troubles a married accountant might have.

While that does have potential, you might like to throw in a murder, kidnapping, or blackmail. Not because that’s happened to you – or anyone else in the office – but because it adds interest and tension, and you read murder/thriller books, so you know how it goes.

I don’t read that genre, so it’s pointless me writing those kinds of books. Though I might be able to cobble together a placard-waving protest group with wellie-wearing folks laying down in front of tractors and diggers, who spend the rest of the day in a cell in the local police station. Fingerprints taken.

“Write what you read or watch” might be better advice.

You don’t have to go through that awful divorce yourself to be able to write it into your story, because you’ve seen enough in movies and on TV, and read it in books.

But the vicarious experience thus gained can take you only so far.

Example: Mr Bloggs might pig-out on movies and books set in bustling cities. But if Mr Bloggs has lived his entire life in a quiet rural village will he really understand what life is like in the city?

For myself, I cannot begin to imagine the everyday stresses of living in, say, New York.

The same can be said of any environment, whether geographic, national, geological, or natural. Does the city dweller understand what life’s like for Mr Bloggs? Does a native of the temperate climes understand what life is like in a desert, or a rainforest?

Reading and watching is no substitute for the lived experience.

And that’s why we can be fully immersed in a story when…oops! That jarring moment when something shouts inaccuracy.

It’s happened to me. Most often with American writers who’ve set their story in contemporary or historical England. Though I’m sure it happens the other way around, with English writers setting their story in America.

A long vacation in the featured setting might help. But how do you travel to a historical period?

I don’t set myself above or apart from this, for I’m pretty sure I do it too. Setting my stories in a pre-industrial society is sure to bring up loads of inaccuracies. I cannot go visit, I cannot know. Looking at those few remaining societies in our own time can provide just so much material.

Keeping to the fantasy genre helps because this is the world that I’ve built, and I can be as anachronistic as I want.

Being an archaeology nerd, I know that the life I portray is a million miles wide of the truth. But then, in being true to the reality of that world would the story be laden with facets that todays’ readers would not understand? Most likely, yes.

So what am I saying?

I’m advocating for research, even if you think that you’re well informed. Don’t assume you know something just because you’ve read it or watched it somewhere.

You only have to look at the historically inaccurate ‘Viking’ costumes that litter our screens. The Vikings wore COLOURS, and rich fabrics. They traded in the East, ffs. But today we’re fed visions of black, black, black and grey. They’re portrayed as unkempt. Yet archaeology and contemporary reports tell us that these people cared for their appearance e.g. with regular combing of their hair, and daily washes.

And that’s all I’m saying today

Thank you for reading. Love to read your comments. Keep them coming.