Write What You Want to Know
By Jeff Mariotte
I can’t remember which writer it was who said (or wrote) “I write the books I’d like to read, if only someone else would write them” (paraphrasing here; since I can’t remember who it was, I certainly can’t remember the exact words. But that was the meat of it).
It’s a good approach, though, whoever said it. Or as Rick Nelson put it in song, “You can’t please everyone, so you gotta please yourself.”
Another bit of writerly wisdom (albeit less sound) is: “write what you know.” We’ve all heard that one, and it’s true to a point—but only to a point. It’s true that a lifelong Manhattanite who has never left the city and whose entire understanding of the historical West comes from reruns of F Troop will likely not write a very good historical Western. It’s also true that, while very few of us have ever been serial killers, we have some things in common with them. We may never have stalked a human through a darkened, unfamiliar apartment, but most of us have walked through an unfamiliar space in the dark, even if it’s just a hotel room or our own house the day after moving, when we don’t know where anything—even the light switch—has ended up. We’ve also known anxiety that something we’re doing might go wrong. We’ve known desire—for a mate, a new job, a new car, a rare book—that we can translate into the killer’s desire. Writing what you know doesn’t have to mean that we can only transcribe our own life experience (how boring would that be?), but that we take aspects of our experience and apply it to different characters and situations.
I actually prefer to combine these two bits of received wisdom into one: write what you want to know. I bring this up now because of a couple of recent reading experiences, when things that I know slammed up against things that I read in such a way as to pull me out of the story, and that’s never a good thing. One was in a recent Jonah Hex comic, when DC Western character Bat Lash (full disclosure: both Jonah and Bat appear in a novel I just finished for DC Comics, called Superman: Trail of Time) was playing faro, and claimed a “full house.” In faro, however, players don’t have poker hands, and there’s no such thing as a full house. The artist researched and drew a proper faro layout, but the writers didn’t put the effort into knowing how the game was played.
The other incident was in Stephen King’s Cell. As a preface, I think King is one of the best popular novelists the English language has ever had, and I love to read him. But in Cell, protagonist Clay Riddell has just been to Boston, where he sold a graphic novel to Dark Horse Comics for a substantial piece of change. As the city goes nuts around him, he carries his portfolio containing “…his Dark Wanderer pictures (to him they were always pictures, never drawings or illustrations)…”
What’s wrong with all this? (Besides the fact that six pages earlier, we had the sentence “All but a dozen or so of his Dark Wanderer drawings were in there, and it was the drawings that his mind seized on”—the drawings/pictures slip is a contradiction a copy editor should have caught, but it’s not what I’m here to talk about today.)
With more than 15 years of experience in virtually every aspect of the comics industry, I can say these things are almost universally true:
a) Dark Horse, located in Oregon, isn’t going to send someone to Boston to view a proposal by an unknown (or even a known). They’d tell Clay to mail it to them, or to come to a convention they’ll be at anyway. Most comics proposals are done via mail or e-mail, not in person.
b) Said unknown isn’t going to sell a “graphic novel” for big bank. Maybe he’ll get a commitment for a comic book miniseries, if the work is good enough. “Graphic novel” and “comic book” aren’t synonymous.
c) No pro artist—not even any artist who’s been around comics long enough to know what size to draw his pages—calls his pages “pictures” or “drawings” or “illustrations.” Clay would call them “pages” (which he does once or twice, but not consistently). That’s what they are, after all—parts of a whole, not individual stand-alone pieces of art. He might have a few drawings in the portfolio too—character studies, that kind of thing, to back up his proposal, but Dark Horse would want to see the pages, not the drawings.
How many readers, of the millions Steve has earned, will be bothered by these mistakes? A small handful. Those of us who are, though, will find Cell less real than many of his other books simply because we can’t believe in the initial motivation for the character to be in Boston when things go haywire, and that’s the set-up for everything that follows.
I’m not going to suggest that Steve did no research for that aspect of the book, but chances are he’s been around comics long enough to think he knew how to phrase what he wanted to say, and he was wrong.
Doing research is fun if you’re learning about things you want to learn about anyway, have a reason for doing so (which comes with a paycheck), and can deduct your research costs from your taxes. What could be better?
You might spend days, weeks, months or years writing a novel that a reader can get through in a few hours, so you’d better be interested in what you’re writing about. If you’re interested, you might as well learn what you can and strive to get the facts right. And if you’re not, that lack of interest will surely come across in the finished work, causing your reader to lose interest as well.
Knowing more about your subject matter can help you add the telling detail, the specificity that makes a book come alive to the reader. Writing about a comic artist, for instance, if you have her working on Blue Line Pro art boards, then you’ve got an amateur or a newbie, who picks it up at her local comic shop but doesn’t know that the word Pro in the name doesn’t mean it’s what the pros use, because they almost never do. An actual pro is far more likely to use DC or Marvel illustration board left over from her last job for those companies, because it’s better board and hey! It’s free! The handful of readers who are comics artists, or know one, will nod knowingly at this, because it rings true. It pulls them into the story. The rest of the world will appreciate the insight into the way that business works, because one of the fulfilling aspects of fiction is that it takes us into worlds we wouldn’t or couldn’t visit otherwise.
I get things wrong from time to time, too, of course. None of us are perfect. In my Andromeda novel, I apparently did my interstellar math wrong (although I was working from a map of the Andromeda universe, as determined by the show’s producers) and put too many parsecs between one point and another. More commonly, in TV tie-in work, things are revealed on the show after your book is done but before publication, or before a given reader sees the book, that contradict what you thought was true when you wrote it. So it’s wrong even if it was beyond your control.
For my next book (to be released by Pocket Books a week from today—check it out!), 30 Days of Night: Rumors of the Undead (written with Steve Niles, who created the original comic) I learned facts about FBI agents (which including asking questions of one as well as online research), details about Barrow, AK and its airport, where streetwalkers m
ight stroll in Madison, WI (it’s amazing what you can find out online), incidents of disappearances of entire communities throughout history, and many other fun bits of knowledge. Doing so helps keep me interested in what I’m writing and helps keep the book real (even though it’s about vampires, which I hope are imaginary).
Learning new things is never bad. Learning them and applying what you’ve learned to your craft is something you owe yourself and your audience. So write the book you wish you could read, and to do it, write about something you wanted to learn anyway. There’s no down side.
