Writing Outside the Comfort Zone

Apr 6, 2009

This week I’ve been concentrating on preparation and research for my new Urban Fantasy project.  I’m excited by the project, but getting words on the page has been much tougher than I thought. I haven’t actually set word-count goals yet, but normally I’m bursting to get writing, and didn’t feel that way this time.

I asked myself why.  After all, I love this project, so why the reluctance? Then I realised: I’m outside my comfort zone. (Yeah, it’s a cliché, but it’s 6 in the morning. I get to be lazy any time before 8. House rules.)

This project, unlike others I’ve done recently, required research.  Sure, for Ordinary Angels I had to double-check my facts about San Francisco (been a couple of years since I’ve been there) and I even exchanged a couple of letters with someone who’s particularly fond of salsa dancing, but that seemed like no big deal to me.

Between is different. It’s not the faery bit that makes me nervous, because I don’t mind creating my own magical rules. It’s the cop bit. Between starts with a killing. My faery isn’t that interested in the victim, but she’s very interested in the killer. And where there’s killers, there’s cops. I could have, I suppose, glossed over the cop part, but that would have felt lazy to me. Having a cop character opened up some avenues that I quite liked once I got going.

But man, oh man. I do NOT want to get it wrong.

I’ve got a local copper who is willing to help me out and answer questions, and has given me some recommended reading on police procedure in the UK, which is quite nice, actually. So why do I still worry?

When mulling this morning, after a particularly awful night’s sleep, I realised it was because of the intangibles.  Like when a man who doesn’t understand women tries to write about the way a woman thinks, but she ends up acting like a blow-up doll, or when a teen tries to write about adult situations but his characters come across either as monsters or, well, teens. It feels wrong, and everyone knows it. Well, everyone except the author, apparantly. That is what scares me. Gives me both the heebies and the jeebies.

Too many writers take the adage “write what you know” too much to heart and write about angsty, coffee-addicted writers in search of equilibrium.  Others ignore it and write about countries, cultures, or historical periods they don’t understand. I’m not saying you have to be 300 years old to write about the Jacobite Uprisings, but when writing outside the comfort zone, there’s two ways to do it: Well, and badly.

You historical writers out there will know exactly what I mean, I’m sure! And yes, I have two friends who are writing about this very period in Scotland at this very moment, and no, I don’t think either of you are doing it badly. This is about me. I’m absolutely petrified about getting it wrong.

I think it’s worse that my story is contemporary, because with the Jacobite Uprisings, for example, there is a limited pool of people who would really know if you got it horribly wrong (most of them historical romance readers). With Between and the deaths and police investigations that follow, there are no end of people who would be witness to my utter humiliation of my cops sound like complete ninnies.

So, what to do? Well, I think I’ve either got to give up the faery novel and write that burning expose on writers staying in their jammies past noon, or I have to push through the fear. My resolve has to be to be willing to be wrong, and then be willing to find out where I went wrong (because preventing wrongness seems to be out of my reach), and then be willing to ask for help, feedback, and fix it.

I can do that. I feel slightly better now.