They say, ‘write what you know,’ but does that mean if you’re not an astronaut, you can’t write about astronauts? Okay, maybe it helps, but that’s what research is for. Personally, I take the rule of, ‘write what you know’ a little more loosely than that.

Take, for instance, yesterday’s post where I used the example, ‘The steamy kitchen reeked like a wet cat,’ when showing what better detail looked like. Had anyone asked me what a wet cat smells like, I would have had to tell them that I honestly have no idea. I’ve never owned a cat, let alone a wet one. In other words, I think it’s the details where our experience really comes in handy.

Having said that, not all things can really be described. 99.9% of us have had at least a sip of water, but can you describe the taste? And take, for instance, what it’s like to urinate. We’ve all (100% of us this time I think) done it, but if I’m writing from the point of view of a male, I’m unable to accurately describe the action of doing so standing up. Does that mean I shouldn’t write from the male perspective? Again, research comes in handy. I can ask other people (preferably male ones) to tell me what it’s like, but I still won’t have had the experience. And so I’ll probably never write a story in which my male character is dealing with bladder issues. Either that or, like the wet cat, I’ll get good at faking it.

My novel takes place in a real city: Kingston, Ontario, Canada. I don’t live there, but I’ve been there many times, and thought I knew the place well enough to be able to set a story there. Said story written, I decided to take the time to vacation there for a few days by myself, to really do some research, and I was amazed at what I gleaned. Because my characters get off the train there at the beginning of the novel, the station was one of my obvious places to visit. I sat to wait for the westbound train and whist there, noted the colours of the waiting room seats, the landscape outside – even the way the doors worked. When the train stopped I watched to see which track it was on, so I knew my characters would disembark on the nearside of the station rather than having to take the underground passage to get across. All of this will come to perhaps a sentence or two in the novel, but I believe it will add to the feel, as well as have the people who live in Kingston nodding in agreement when they read my book. I could never have accomplished this from information I took from Wikipedia; I had to experience it for myself.

Other life experiences from my past also often manage to creep into my stories. What comes through most vividly for my characters to experience are the wonders of nature I have had the gift of being part of.  There’s nothing quite like the quiet of a country field on a snowy night, or the singing of cicadas on a sweltering summer afternoon. These are the things that make fiction come to life. Real life.

Can you tell when something is contrived in a story?

For today’s A-Z Fiction, please click here: http://lindaghillfiction.wordpress.com/2014/04/05/e-is-for-elementary-dear-jupiter/