The author as observer…
“Write what you know” is stereotypical advice writing coaches serve up. It’s complete bullshit, of course! In the collection Howling at the Moon where my short story “Gamin” appears, I write about a copper and urchin fighting crime on the moon. Obviously I’ve never been to the moon, so I can’t know what it’s like. That story sprung from my imagination!
I’ve never been to China either (and until that country becomes a democracy, I refuse to go!). But in Aristocrats and Assassins, NYPD Detective Dao-Ming Chen was in Beijing; and so was Mary Jo Menendez at the end of Goin’ the Extra Mile. Again, these were imaginary travels I made in my mind to write two stories. Chen’s trip to Beijing was related to later action that took place at an air force base in Germany…that I never visited!
I took Esther Brookstone and new husband Bastian van Coevorden on a riverboat cruise down the Danube in the novel Death on the Danube, and my wife and I took a similar trip where I took copious notes and then wrote the novel. Of course, there were no murders on our real trip, but I made good use of the information collected. Authors can use real experiences in their stories, but they don’t have to do so…and sometimes that’s impossible.
But none of that’s the key point here. It’s not the settings; it’s the characters. A fiction author’s characters don’t necessarily come alive by putting them in real settings. They come alive if they seem to be real, whether the settings are imagined or real. All the characters named above seem real (at least to me); and, to achieve that, I had to be a keen observer of human nature. Every fiction author must become an amateur psychologist who spends time observing real human beings.
Yes, I know that’s not easy. I once wanted to be an anthropologist, so I read a few classic tomes on the subject. (Imagine what the old librarian thought when that pudgy kid struggled out with all those heavy books!) But I soon decided that humans are very complicated. I still think that, if not more so, but after observing a lot more people, I believe I can create believable characters.
Plots, themes, characters, settings, and dialogue are the ingredients of fiction. Authors can make all those better with observation and some imagination. Get to it!
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Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!
