Becoming an ‘Expert’

Even if you have to fake it!

I’m reading a wonderful writers’ guide at the moment. It’s called ‘Bird by Bird’ by Anne Lamott. I would strongly recommend it. It’s honest, punchy, funny and extremely helpful. I’ve learnt a lot.

There is so much useful advice in the book that I could quote reams of it (assuming I had permission) but I’ll confine myself to one memorable section which is concerned with the use of specialist information. Lamott says she hates gardening and is absolutely useless at it (I sense a kindred spirit here) but she once wrote a novel about a character who loved horticulture. In order to make her authentic, she contacted a keen gardener friend and together they created a fictitious garden for this character. Every few weeks she would contact the friend to find out what stage her character’s plants would be at according to the season so that all her descriptions were authentic. It worked so well that after the book was published many people tried to strike up gardening conversations with her, assuming she was an enthusiast, then she had to confess to knowing nothing about plants. Nonetheless, her skill as a writer combined with her friend’s knowledge, enabled her to pull off the deception.

Readers want to trust writers. They don’t expect us to be experts on everything, but they want to know we’ve done our research and that we are not misleading them with false information (unless we’ve deliberately created an unreliable narrator). In my work-in- progress I’ve had cause to contact a mathematician, a sailor, a military historian and a meteorologist in order to pretend I know something about numbers, boats, world war two battles and weather fronts – although in truth I’m completely ignorant about all of these things!

I’ve found that people are genuinely happy to help and usually very generous with their time and knowledge. I always offer to recognise their input in my acknowledgements at the back of the book. Sometimes a friend’s advice is better than something we’ve gleaned from the internet – readers can also spot an ‘info dump’ a mile off. As long as our information is well integrated and plausible we can present ourselves as ‘experts.’ And no one will ever know – unless we decide to confess!