Welcome Lisa Blackwood to DIO

A great thing about blogging is the ability to learn from others.  My guest today, Lisa Blackwood, a friend and fellow author from Muse It Up Publishing, provides us with something to ponder.   On with the show...

Write What You Know

As a writer, one thing I’ve heard several times is ‘write what you know’. In other words, write about a topic you are familiar with and incorporate that knowledge into your writing in some fashion. The idea is to make the story more believable, and it also has the added bonus of making the writer’s job a touch easier—less research and all that.(If only it was so easy. LOL.)

Which is all well and good, but when I first read that piece of sage knowledge I wondered how that applied to writing science fiction and fantasy, since both are not-of-this-world so to speak. Still, you can take things from the mundane world and add them to your made up world.

A beta reader once mentioned a great number of horse issues in my writing. I didn’t know a thing about horses at the time, and she suggested I go take some riding lessons to better understand them; as an added benefit, I’d stop annoying horse people with my inaccurate descriptions (you know, things like horses that can gallop all day, never spook, don’t have to spend hours grazing every day to live. You know, important stuff like that.) I took her advice, and started volunteering at a nearby horse rescue. After a year and a half, I now know enough to write realistic horses, I hope. I even went so far as to adopt one. I’m not saying authors have to go so far to get into their characters mindset, but even a few minutes of research is valuable.

Back to the topic of writing what you know. Another thing from my real life that was helpful in a fictional world was my knowledge of birds. Go figure.

Betrayal’s Price (Coming soon from MuseItUp Publishing) is epic fantasy with romantic elements and the hero Sorntar, a phoenix, is half avian. I knew from early on I wanted him to be more than just a human man with wings stuck on his back, I wanted him to be more, to be other. So I looked to nature—if he was half bird, then he needed a few bird traits. I’ve kept birds as pets since I was a child, so giving Sorntar a few bird traits wasn’t all the hard, humorous, but not hard.

The second novel I wrote, Stone’s Kiss, is a paranormal romance/urban fantasy, and has a gargoyle hero. Gregory was a little more complex than Sorntar, but twice as much fun to write. Gregory just knew who and what he was from the get go, and had no problems with deviating from my carefully planned plot. ::mumbles under breath about unruly, headstrong characters::  Whereas Sorntar was clearly birdlike and I could draw on the mythological phoenix for some character traits and magical abilities, Gregory, as a gargoyle, didn’t have a corresponding animal or even much mythology to draw on. So I started to look at other animals until I found the correct mix of traits that ‘felt’ like they’d match my vision of how a gargoyle would think and act. In the end, while still having a fundamental human quality, Gregory also had some canine and big cat tendencies mixed in too. 

My question to you—what can you take from your everyday life and put into a fictional world. Go on. Give it a try. You might be surprised what you’ll come up with.

Lisa Blackwood, author of urban fantasy, paranormal romance and epic fantasy.
 
www.lisablackwood.com
http://blackwoodsforest.wordpress.com/
Stone's Kiss http://www.amazon.com/Stones-Kiss-The-Avatars-ebook/dp/B006EAMITG
Betrayal's Price (Feb. 2012 from Museitup Publishing http://museituppublishing.com/