Writing Beyond Your Experience: Issues for Fiction Authors

“Write what you know” is popular advice often given to writers. That’s because it’s easier to imagine a setting you know well and write about it in a way that reflects what it really is like there.

You’re less likely to make big errors that will make the story sound unbelievable or unconvincing to readers. That doesn’t mean you don’t have to do any research, and memory is fallible too, but it’s an easier option than writing beyond your experience.

Setting and perspective offer different challenges here.

Setting

Imagine your novel is set in medieval Scotland, but it includes raccoons playing in the woods. That wouldn’t go down well with readers from Scotland – the reference would pull them out of the story. So if you’re writing about a real-world setting, then you need to do enough research to satisfy your audience.

Perspective

Perspective is even harder, as it’s much more intimate. Here, there’s an argument that you are always writing somewhat beyond your experience, unless your viewpoint or focus character is really you. For example:

• Can or should a man write a novel from a woman’s perspective and vice versa?

• Can or should a Black person write a novel from a white person’s perspective and vice versa?

Now, writing a novel from a different perspective can teach you a lot about that perspective. That process can be incredibly enlightening for the person writing the novel.

But most novels aren’t written to facilitate an author’s journey of personal discovery (although that can be a great side-effect!). They’re written to entertain and communicate something (a theme, message, perspective, feeling) to the readers. Some useful questions to ask are:

• Could my novel written from this other perspective (that isn’t my own) cause harm to people living within that perspective?

• Would publishing my novel open up a space for more positive engagement with that perspective?

• Am I best-positioned to tell this story or would it be better if someone else told it?

An example of writing beyond your experience: men writing female characters

Over the years, I’ve had lots of conversations with female friends about how badly men have narrated women characters in their novels, but I’ve had very few conversations with men about how badly women have narrated male characters.

One concept from cultural anthropology can explain this: imaginative identification. A cultural anthropologist named David Graeber wrote:

A popular exercise among high school creative writing teachers in America, for example, is to ask students to imagine they have been transformed, for a day, into someone of the opposite sex, and describe what that day might be like. The results, apparently, are uncannily uniform. The girls all write long and detailed essays that clearly show they have spent a great deal of time thinking about the subject. Usually, a good proportion of the boys refuse to write the essay entirely. Those who do make it clear they have not the slightest conception what being a teenage girl might be like, and deeply resent having to think about it.

David Graeber calls this inequality “lopsided structures of imaginative identification.”

People who live in a society where they belong to some kind of minority group and regularly come into contact with a majority often spend lots of time managing and maintaining their presence vis-à-vis the majority group. But the opposite isn’t true: majority group members don’t spend lots of time adapting to minority group practices (what is more, when asked to do so, they are often resistant to that).

Take this example: if you work in an office, you can bet that lots of staff members talk about the boss’s actions, how the boss treats the staff, and so on. And you can bet that, say, a low-ranking clerical assistant doesn’t get all that commentary.

That’s because the stakes are higher for considering the boss’s actions, and so people in the office engage in this process of imaginative identification, second-guessing her decisions, motivations, actions etc.

The same applies to minorities second-guessing majority mindsets and behaviors. This is why a lot of the British novels full of nuanced social critique were written by women – because they had consciously navigated all these aspects and inequalities, while they were relatively invisible to most men. If you’re writing from a position of privilege, you will probably not have considered lots of the nuances captured in “imaginative identification.” And you’ll have to do lots of research and ask people familiar with that perspective (e.g., beta readers, sensitivity readers) to get up to speed. That’s the next topic!

Kinds of research

Research can involve consulting written sources or learning through experiences.

Written sources

Oftentimes, casual research is enough. Provided your audience is the general public and not subject experts. You can play to your strengths here. If you have a botany degree, you could include some botanical worldbuilding in your novel. Just be careful not to assume the reader knows too much.

If writing a historical novel, you will likely want to do some more serious research – this could include secondary academic sources (written by historians today) or primary academic sources (written in the period your novel is set in). This can really enhance your sense of time and place.

Experiential research

Telling a story from an imaginary perspective is what makes novel writing so fascinating. A perspective isn’t about collected facts and data (watch out – some authors describe scenes in a kind of objective, factual way!). A perspective is about someone’s experience of the world and the things they notice.

And this is why I highly recommend you get out there and experience some of the settings and situations your viewpoint characters experience! If you’re an FBI agent entering a building and expecting enemy fire, then you will be tuned in to where someone could be hiding or preparing to attack you from, and you’d need a finely developed understanding of what they might do next.

An anarchist setting up a squat in that same building would have a completely different experience.

They’d be checking to see what resources are present and how they could set up the space.

An estate agent would enter and make calculations on what features affect the building’s price.

And so on.

Experiencing settings firsthand and making notes (e.g. journalling on what comes to mind after experiencing something) will help make your fiction richer.

And if you experience those settings whilst also imagining what your viewpoint character might notice, then you’ll have a rich imagination on which to draw too.

You’ll notice that what I’m encouraging you to do here is to engage in imaginative identification,

And this kind of work is even more important if you haven’t by default done much of that already. This is also where the social sciences and humanities can help fiction authors out.

• Historical research can help you write more believable, accurate settings

• Doing interviews with people who talk about their life and experiences can improve your empathy for and understanding of that person’s perspective

• Fieldwork can give you insights into how other people navigate real-life settings and situations

• Ethnography (writing about that fieldwork experience) can encourage imaginative identification and a reflective practice that can generate new insights

Hiring sensitivity readers

Finally, you can hire sensitivity readers to give feedback on your novel. This is crucial as such readers will be tuned in to aspects of experience you may have passed over. But this is a topic for a separate blog post!

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Andrew Hodges, PhD, is a fiction editor and publishing consultant who creates content on writing craft, worldbuilding, relationships, and queer perspectives in fiction.

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