I love this idea! So true. Thank you for an excellent and inspiring post.

In my first four books, the Greg Tenorly series, I went with the “write what you know” philosophy, creating a main character who was much like myself. But after a while, I began to realize that I was enjoying the other characters more than my main character. Fortunately, I had to get into the heads of many other people that are nothing like me, including some very devious bad guys.

In the new Rebecca Ranghorn mystery series I’m writing, my lead character is a woman. And in the first book, her sidekick is a man who may or may not be gay. They have to deal with two tough guys from New York, a brilliant black woman who is a research scientist, a topless restaurant, and other types of people and places that are not within my realm of experience.

It is definitely going to be my best book yet. However, friends and family are going to be looking at me more strangely than ever before.

Ah, the joys of writing fiction.

“The part of us that we write from is far deeper than our everyday selves. In fact it has nothing whatsoever to do with our everyday selves. It comes from the Muse. It comes from the unconscious. It comes from some place we only tap into in dreams or intuition or inspiration.”

You put that much more eloquently than I could’ve done. That’s completely true. The Human Condition is so surprisingly broad. We think we only know a little, but in fact inside us is everything — there’s so much in common between people that if we tap deep enough, we’ll be able to understand. We’re not animals; we can empathize with others.

I do think that such an understanding of people and situations and emotions vastly different from ourselves comes with an important condition: we need to drop our prejudices, our baggage, our assumptions. Every last one of them. We cannot achieve true empathy if we only see the world through OUR point-of-view. I think that’s the key to “writing about what we don’t know”: to be both humble and detached from ego and yet at the same time confident in the fact that deep inside, we know what it means to be Human.

Everything else, the technical details, facts and theories, worlds and histories — writing these is just a matter of research. A story with compelling portrayals and shit academics can hold an audience. A story with lifeless characters and perfect facts isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. Of course we strive to know and to plausibly depict both, but we all know which is the more important.