She pressed herself against the brilliantly coloured bougainvillea’s… and promptly screamed in pain as the two inch thorns forced their way into her tender flesh, drawing bright red beads of blood that ran thickly down her skin, gleaming in the moonlight.
I can’t remember the name of the book, but it was a Harlequin Mills and Boon from the local library’s giveaway pile, sometime in the mid-nineties. The italicised section come from the original book, whilst the rest is how I finished the sentence before giving it back to the library. I would lay fair odds that the writer had never seen a bougainvillea in her life, but every single one that I have ever seen has thorns that reach out to grab you.
This is an example of book learning vs personal experience, and I am sure that you can think of a few from your own life. In the following article, I’ll give you a few hints and tips as to how to add verisimilitude to your work; how to fake it, till you make it, so to speak.
How you research your great unknowns depends on your genre. I will be using examples from my own work, but I will be showing you how to twist them to suit your own genre.
For some odd reason, as I was falling asleep one night, I had a vision of a Special Forces sniper seeing a UFO travelling up an Afghani canyon. #toomuchcheesemostlikely
By the time I wrote the story, a week later, the UFO had become a Yeti, an IED had been added in, and she had been discharged on medical grounds and was now working as a cryptozoologist. Toss in some cursed gold and a ghost pirate, and I was good to go.
BUT…
I know nothing about the Army, guns, how IED’s work, and on and on.
BUT (again)…
I did know how I would feel if I could never write again, and FEELINGS are universal.
So I Googled what I could,(Hi ASIO, I know that I’m on your watch list, but I’m harmless, I swear!) and chose to go with her emotional journey. So now she has PTSD, and is dealing with the loss of the career that she loved. For the first draft, I used the word GUN, or KNIFE, if I didn’t have a clue. I read copious amounts of biographies by SEAL snipers, British snipers, and Australian snipers. I asked friends who were shooters if I could look at their guns, just so that I could describe how it felt, how heavy it was, even how it smelled.
Those are the details on which to concentrate if you are without full knowledge of experience. You are a human, your character is a human (presumably), and as already stated, emotion is a universal experience.
Books can only take you so far however. Does your character scuba dive, skydive, play Canasta? If possible, do those things, even if you’ve finished the book. I took myself off for a camel ride because my character was riding one in Book Three.
TIP ONE:
ASK QUESTIONS: Don’t be afraid to get on the phone to complete strangers and ask them questions about their jobs. I’ve cold-called the National Parks and Wildlife Service to find out about snakes, and a Catholic Cardinal because I needed to know when suicide stopped being a mortal sin.
Doctors often look askance at me when I blithely ask about killing someone in some horrible way, and random people on the street are always gobsmacked when I chat to them. Note this: If someone has a passion for something then asking them a question almost guarantees that you will get WAY more information than you will ever need (or thought there was).
Yes, cold-calling someone can be scary, but we are writers and we NEED TO KNOW, so Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, as the title of that famous book goes. And if the person who you call has no clue, then they most likely will know someone who does (and that’s how I got to chat to the Cardinal in Lismore for an hour).
Curiosity is one of the defining characteristics of a writer: be curious enough to find out what you need to know — and find someone who knows the answer.
TIP TWO:
WRITE IT DOWN. Have a section of your Bible where you write down all of the things that you don’t know, so that you don’t get tongue-tied when someone answers the phone — and be prepared to scribble fast. Very few people will stick to the bare bones, people love to share anecdotes and you may come away with a treasure trove of information. Way more than you actually need for just one book.
BUT MY BOOKS ARE ALL SET ON PLANET X — AND I CAN’T ASK ANYONE ABOUT THAT!!!
Do you have humans in the mix?
Well, there’s your answer.
How does it feel on Planet X? Is the gravity higher or lower? How does it smell? What does the indigenous life look like? How does it act?
Ask all of these questions and more in your Bible. I mean, if Tolkien (who had never actually visited Middle-Earth, and had to invent an entire language) could write enduring classics — you can too.
So, how did he do it? He created characters that the reader cared about. He gave them an epic quest and dire consequences should they fail. George R R Martin has done the same thing; he took the events of the Cousin’s War (AKA The War of the Roses) and set it in Westeros.
Now if he would only sit his butt in the seat and finish writing the last book instead of engaging in side-quests!!!
To sum up: Use your own experiences and how you felt, ask lots of questions (IMPORTANT), listen to the answers (MORE IMPORTANT), get clarification if you don’t understand.
And dream — always remember to dream.
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