Writing and medical education
I'm corresponding on Tinder after a long time with a lady who works in the medical field.
I also heard the following objection from her: "You can write a story about a doctor if you are a doctor yourself, or know the field well".
Just like a month ago, when I wanted to write about growing roses, instead of an acquaintance telling me what she likes about gardening, she also told me that you shouldn't write about what you don't know.
I think people have a wrong idea about writers. If I only wrote about what I know extremely well, then all the stories would be about school, chess school, computer games, spiritual development, skateboarding, and a few other topics.
The prerogative of writers is precisely that when interviewing people and studying various areas of life, they write about them through their own prism. Almost all writers do this. I was told about this extensively in my studies of Baltic philology at university.
My flatmate is a nurse. I correspond with a social worker and a gynecologist on a daily basis. My acquaintance is currently studying in his 5th year at the biggest medical university in Latvia. Two acquaintances are fitness trainers.
It is difficult for me to name any of my everyday people who would not be able to name all the organs in a human or would not know what the tonsils or appendix do.
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In a way, writing is like anthropology - you study groups of people, phenomena in society, highlight some aspects, illuminate them, show them in a new light, everyone is amazed (if you write well).
Exactly. I started doing NaNoWriMo in 2007, when a friend on a gaming forum I used to belong to said, "You like to write, have you thought of trying NaNoWriMo?"
Back then the criteria for a win were much more strict than they are now. It took me NINE YEARS to pull off a win. Nine years of trying and failing to reach that 50,000-word goal, and in some years my word count was zero because I couldn't make my ideas turn into a story.
And then in 2016 I decided to stop what I was doing because it clearly wasn't working. I tried something different - and succeeded. I crossed that 50k threshold, and then some. And by that time, NaNo was doing smaller events in April and July, so I tried those - and succeeded.
November 2017 didn't result in a win because my computer opted to die. But 2018 was the year I started novelizing my favorite computer games - fanfiction, which was finally a recognized and legitimate category that was allowed. 2018 wasn't easy to pull off, but I did it. And I haven't looked back since.
I had to find my niche(s) of what I was good at, what I could sustain interest in, and what I was prepared to do for the rest of the year besides just in November. NaNoWriMo was originally started because a guy named Chris Baty got tired of hearing people say "I'd like to write a book but I don't have the time." He figured out a way to help people make the time, and made it a competition to make it more compelling. It's not that you're competing with anyone else. You've got a goal to meet. If you meet it, you win. If not, you don't.
But even in the years I didn't win, I still learned some things. One of the first things I learned was that just because I might like a particular type of story, it doesn't mean I'm good at writing them myself. So scrap those ideas that went nowhere, because all they do is foster discouragement and self-annoyance.
Writers are often encouraged to "write what you know" and that's why a lot of things I do know and am familiar with make it into my stories. The ones I'm currently working on have main characters who are at least interested in some of the things that have been important in my own life. One of my Fighting Fantasy characters likes music. My main King's Heir character plays and composes music. I couldn't give him an organ to play, since organs weren't around in the century and place where he lived, but I gave him that era's equivalent - an instrument I also know how to play. And then I got the idea that there are other instruments that existed then but I don't know how to play. So... two nights' worth of research later, I decided to expand his abilities and repertoire. Believe it or not, there are YouTube videos with instructions on how to play the spoons.
There are a lot of things I want in these stories that I don't know about, so that's where the research comes in. There's a comic strip where a team of agents monitoring people's internet searches comes up with a list of things a particular individual is searching. Some of it involves weapons, and one agent wonders, "Should we flag this?" The other agent reads off the rest of the list, that includes a variety of historical references, details of what the parts of some obscure 13th century things are, a recipe or two, the history of a particular type of cloth and the garments made from it, a couple of naming sites, and concludes, "Nah, just another fanfiction writer. Harmless."
We do research a tremendous variety of things. There was a thread in the NaNo forums about "the weirdest thing you ever researched for a story". The conversation took an interesting turn when I asked about how much damage unhatched chicken eggs would get from being left out in the rain all day (a scene in the King's Heir computer game; there's a bowl of chicken eggs sitting on the side of a road and it's raining, and the storyline doesn't mention why they're there; it's the sort of weird detail that my mind latched onto, and I decided to have the pov character try to figure it out). This led to a conversation on the forum about how much chicken eggs cost in the 11th century, how valuable chickens were, and I learned some interesting things about that (turns out they're more valuable than I'd thought, which makes it all the more weird that these eggs were just left lying around like that).
But in general when it comes to writing, I like Isaac Asimov's approach. He never met a subject he wouldn't write about, even if he knew nothing about it at the time when an editor or publisher asked him if he could. He'd always say, "Yes" and then head to the library to learn about whatever it was. Then he'd write the article or story.
So the people who say writers should only write what they know are seeking to limit what a writer can do. Granted, there are things I'd never write about because they're things I know I couldn't do justice to. So I leave them to people who can. But there are many other things I could write about if I learned about them first.
That's why I anticipate a great deal of time will be invested in researching so many things for my longer projects. It's no good saying, "I'm going to set a story in the place and time of the Glencoe Massacre" and then make stuff up. That's lazy, it's disrespectful to the people who really did experience that event, it's disrespectful to their descendants, and no self-respecting writer would even think of not researching a historical event they wanted to write about but weren't familiar with.
Writing has become part of my daily life, as Chris Baty hoped it would for people participating in NaNoWriMo. He just wanted to encourage people to write, and it finally worked for me. I've worked on my stories every single day since November 2018. Not one day has gone by that I haven't written
something, even if it's only a couple of sentences and a few notes on the back of an envelope. That's more than I had the day before, so I count that as a win. Even if I never do NaNo again, I'll continue to write.
![[pissed]](/images/smilies/pissed.gif "Pissed [pissed]")
