How do you "write what you know" in SF/F?

When I wrote last week about "write what you know," I got one very interesting comment that made me want to write about the topic again. Conor said, "I sometimes find it difficult to call upon personal experiences when writing science fiction, especially scenarios that are somewhat out of my element."

Yes, indeed. I think that this question might apply in some ways to both fantasy and science fictional scenarios. After all, you're dealing with a completely foreign environment in which all kinds of things are different and unexpected. How the heck do you write "what you know" then?

Well, one answer is that you can always learn things through research in the scientific or folkloric arenas required by the fantastical setting of the story. That is a pretty straightforward answer, and always worth pursuing. Indeed, I recently read an article that suggests we keep things as "real" as possible in science fiction and fantasy worldbuilding. It's an excellent point.

A more fundamental answer, though, would be that many "things you know" are hidden just underneath all the foreignness. When I read a story, the thing that strikes me most strongly is usually not the trappings of the environment, but the nature of the human experience that I'm sharing. That "human experience" is something I know. Even my aliens have human-like experience and psychology, and emotional states and reactions that resonate as familiar. Otherwise I'm not convinced anyone would want to read stories about them!

Here are a few examples of "things I know" that I have put into stories just by adding an alien twist:

• I know what it is like to speak a language and not have a native speaker recognize me as a legitimate speaker. I put David Linden in precisely this situation in "Let the Word Take Me."
• I know what it is like to be treated unfairly, like a second-class citizen, and not have any reasonable recourse. I put Rulii in this situation in "Cold Words."
• I know what it is like to have a superior not understand the worth of my contribution to a project. I put Lynn Gable in this situation in "At Cross Purposes."
• I have personally witnessed the in-between culture that can form between foreign visitors to a country and natives of that country - a context in which actual cultural engagement is not welcome. I am putting Adrian Preston in that situation in my story-in-progress called "The Liars."

When you're working in science fiction or fantasy, you can take elements of human experience and turn them into themes that you can then push much further than you might be able to in real life. That is one of the incredible strengths of the genre - it both extrapolates from real life and causes readers to reflect back on it. I believe that "what we know" lies at the core of what makes such stories successful.

It's something to think about.

Merging Experience and Fiction (Write what you know)

I just finished writing a chapter that I would not have been able to write ten years ago.

This is not entirely true; I could have written the chapter, but it wouldn't have come out the way it did. I mean, I know my characters really well. I've thought through their personal histories and their cultural backgrounds and all of that, which puts me in a good position to delve into the layers of their reactions to events. I know, for example, that my antagonist is not going to respond to a pass in the way normal people would because he's more interested in experiences that can stop him from entering obsessive thought cycles than he is in falling in love, or even experiencing simple physical pleasure. Since I'm not subject to these obsessive cycles myself, this kind of writing does not access my own personal experience...except inasmuch as I'm very good at internalizing certain kinds of language patterns, so I've "learned his language."

But for the chapter I just wrote, I used my own experience - of childbirth, and motherhood.

I've spoken to a couple of people about this chapter, and on both occasions I was asked whether this was my own experience. My husband even asked me if I was ever afraid that my son was going to die. In fact, I wasn't at all - never once.

So what did I actually give to this chapter from my own experience?

In this chapter a critical female character is speaking to her servant about the birth of her son, while the two of them watch over him in a sickbed (he's in danger of dying). My gloss for what she would speak to him about was this: "She talks about what her son means to her." Super-vague. When I got to the point of writing it I realized that she could explain what her son means to her by telling the story of how he was born, and illuminate aspects of her own life experience at the same time. I didn't hesitate to go to my own experience at this point - as a resource which I could then fit to the needs of the story.

Here's sort of how the process went.

1. "I need to have her describe a difficult first birth experience."
2. "Hey, my first birth experience was difficult!"
3. "Yeah, but she can't have had a C-section. No problem, I'll just say she didn't have one."
4. "Even if she didn't have a C-section, her baby can still have been weak at birth and taken away for treatment, like mine. That totally fits with the whole weak-blood-of-the-nobility thing."
5. "But because she's scared in this chapter that he'll die, she has to have been scared back then too that her baby would die. So I'll say they kept him away longer than mine."
6. "Hey, I bet I could also use that frustrated feeling I got with my second child when they didn't show her to me for an hour. An hour would be a good time frame."
7. "Shoot, and she's got this cad of a husband (unlike me!!!) who cares more about sustaining the population of the nobility than he does about her, and so she must have been really worried about how he'd react if the baby died."
   
8. "Boy, I remember how I felt when I realized my son would be okay. So that means she won't have been able to be happy precisely, but that she'll have cried and promised him the two of them would be okay."
9. "And that means that she'll want more than ever in the current scene to promise him that he'll be okay."
10. "And imagine how helpless she'd feel! Wow, that's exactly what I've felt like when I have been up late at night over a baby with a fever and the telephone next to me in case the advice nurse calls back."
    

It was therefore on the basis of this thought process that I wrote the chapter in question. I think it's interesting to note that I didn't use only one of my own experiences. I used three. The framework was my own first birth experience, but on two occasions I accessed other emotional states that I had experienced with my children - the delay in seeing my newborn daughter, and the fear of sitting up with a sick child.

What is in the chapter now isn't my experience at all. It's entirely hers - her trials and her fears in her social context. But because I experienced something like it, I know that the feelings that I'm trying to evoke are real, and that the chapter is stronger as a result.