Writing What You Don’t Know By Gin Phillips

Writing What You Don’t Know

By Gin Phillips

Write what you know. I’ve heard it a million times, and I’ve even said it plenty of times myself. The truth is that, particularly for beginning writers, capturing your own experience has a real power. It’s visceral. But the other truth is that if you’re a writer, you tend to be a curious sort of person. You like to wander and explore. You will almost inevitably want to write about a place you haven’t been or a talent you don’t have or an experience you haven’t lived through.

When I started my second novel, Come in and Cover Me, I had a framework that excited me. I’d long been interested in archaeology in a thematic sense—I wondered what might drive a person to spend their days trying to reconstruct long-ago lives from the objects left behind. I did some preliminary research and decided I wanted my novel to center around archaeologists in New Mexico studying an ancient tribe called the Mimbres. The problem was that—aside from knowing nothing about the Mimbres—I’d also never been to New Mexico or had anything to do with an archaeology dig. The concept was a big leap from my first novel, which took place in my home state—Alabama—in a version of my grandmother’s childhood home. Although that book was set decades before I was born, at least I knew the landscape.

Back then, the thought of trying to learn an entire career with all its lingo and technology, plus the history of a vanished people and the geography of an unknown place was both daunting and thrilling. I’ve published six novels now, and it strikes me that for almost all of them, I’ve wound up needing to master something new. Even the books that seemed close to my own life usually required a crash course in something—police procedure or coal mining or fileting a fish, for instance.  Most books, surely, are a blend of the known and unknown for a writer.

Here are a few things I’ve learned when it comes to writing about a topic you know absolutely nothing about.

Talk to the right experts (in the right way). The smartest thing I ever did with Come in and Cover Me was to e-mail and call a lot of different universities and ask about both field experience possibilities and experts who might be up for a chat. I stumbled across crucial criteria when I blurted out, “I’d like someone who can tell good stories.”

I talked to professors at four different universities, and two of them recommended the same person, saying he was both extremely knowledgeable and a great storyteller. He also happened to be leading a two-week dig that summer in the wilds of New Mexico, if I could get myself there. When I met Karl Laumbach, my storytelling archaeologist, he did not disappoint. He knew science and technique and history, but he also knew how to spin a tale. So I’ll say this—you want a smart expert. You want an expert who knows way more than you. But you also need someone who likes to talk and is good at it. You want the details and the parentheticals and the weirds bits and pieces you get if you’re talking to someone after a couple of beers over a campfire.

For my most recent book, Family Law, I based my main character’s experience on a real-life lawyer who’d been one of the earliest women in her field in the 1970s. Our first couple of conversations didn’t get me very far. She was a lawyer—she liked to give precise answers, and I didn’t want precise. Finally, I asked the question, “Were you ever afraid?”

And boom. I got stories. I learned to leave my questions more open-ended, and the material got richer and richer.

You can get facts from a book. You want an expert who gives you texture.

Get your hands dirty.  Like I said, the advantage to writing about your own experience is that it’s visceral. You can feel it. And when you’re stepping outside of your own experience you need to feel that, too. You need to make it your own.

I spent two weeks in a tent in New Mexico because I needed to know the feel of sliding down an arroyo or the ache of carrying bucketfuls of dirt. It turns out I also needed to know the feel of an outdoor shower as the last light faded and the pull of the current as I washed my hair in the creek and the lung-crushing burn of trying to run a few miles in high altitude. All of those experiences wound up in my novel, and I’d never have imagined any of them without the day-in-day-out rhythms of working with actual archaeologists.

Ask stupid questions. When I stepped off the plane in New Mexico, I realized I had seriously underestimated my lack of knowledge. Not only did I not know anything about archaeology…I didn’t recognize the trees. I saw birds and fish and flowers that I had no idea how to label. I was like a toddler as I walked through the creeks and canyons, pestering whoever was in earshot: What’s that tree? What’s that bird? Is this poop or a rock?

While writing Family Law, I needed to understand police procedure after a drive-by shooting. I have a friend who’s a homicide detective, and my questions were clearly more basic than he expected: Would you get out of the car at the same time? Would you have a glass of water if it was offered?

Here’s the nice thing about toddler questions—they make people comfortable. It can be intimidating, sometimes, to sit down with a writer, but it’s a lot less intimidating if the writer acknowledges that they’re the student. In my experience, most people enjoy being the teacher. Plus those simple questions leave a gap that people want to fill. If I ask about a set of animal tracks in the dirt, maybe someone tells me a coyote made them. Maybe, though, someone tells me about how coyotes were reintroduced into the wild or how one night they walked into their tent to see a coyote sprawled under the cot.

It’s all about gaps, really. You start out with so many of them, as you build a story. Sometimes you need the right people and the right places and the right moments to help you fill them, but there’s such a joy in both the questions and the answers.

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Bio: Gin Phillips is the author of six novels, including Family Law, which will be released in paperback in May 2022. Family Law was chosen as a notable selection for CrimeReads’ Best Historical Fiction of 2021 and Best Crime Novels of 2021. Gin’s previous novel, Fierce Kingdom, was named one of the best books of 2017 by Publishers Weekly, NPR, Amazon, and Kirkus Reviews; her debut novel, The Well and the Mine, won the 2009 Barnes & Noble Discover Award. Her work has been sold in 29 countries.

FAMILY LAW

When an ambitious female lawyer becomes the victim of harassment, she must decide what’s more important: her family’s safety or the rights she’s fighting for?

Set in Alabama in the early ’80s, Family Law follows a young lawyer, Lucia, who is making a name for herself at a time when a woman in a courtroom is still a rarity. She’s received plenty of threats for her work extricating women and children from troubled relationships, but her own happy marriage has always felt far removed from her work. When her mother’s pending divorce brings teenaged Rachel into Lucia’s orbit, Rachel finds herself captivated not only with Lucia, but with the change Lucia represents. Rachel is out-spoken and curious, and she chafes at the rules her mother lays down as the bounds of acceptable feminine behavior. In Lucia, Rachel sees the potential for a new path into womanhood. But their unconventional friendship takes them both to a crossroads. When a moment of violence–a threat made good–puts Rachel in danger, Lucia has to decide how much her work means to her and what she’s willing to sacrifice to keep moving forward.

Written in alternating voices from Lucia and Rachel’s perspectives, Family Law is a fresh take on what the push for women’s rights looks like to the ordinary women and girls who long for a world redefined. Addressing mother daughter relationships and what roles we can play in the lives of women who aren’t our family, the novel examines how we shape each other and how we make a difference. The funny, strong, and yet tender-hearted female leads of Family Law illuminate a new kind of timeless Southern  fiction–atmospheric, rich, and with quietly surprising twists and nuances all its own.

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing