When I was young and I told people that I wanted to be a writer, the usual response I’d get was a polite smile followed by them saying, “that’s great,” and moving on to another topic. Others would probe further and ask what I wanted to write. Still others, not writers themselves, would feel the need to give me unsolicited advice – the most common of which was, “write what you know.”
It’s a common expression, so much so that it’s almost a cliché. While that’s great advice for a kid who’s just learning to express himself, it’s not really practical for a professional. If a writer only wrote what they knew, every book would be about being a writer. (Yes, I know that’s all I’ve written about on this blog so far, but bear with me, please.) As it is, in my brief stint as a feature writer I mostly wrote about Star Trek, The Muppets, and TV and movie adaptations of comic books. And if all I did was “write what I know,” I’d still be writing about those topics ad nauseum.
The thing is, writing is far more stimulating for both author and audience when writers write about what interests them. That’s not to say that I’m not interested in writing about the topics I’ve mentioned. I just want to explore new ideas as well. So while it’s a good idea to start with writing what we know, the real trick to great writing is research…or at least, homework.
My Writer’s Journey Started with What Interested Me, Not What I Knew
Many years ago, I had the notion that I’d try my hand at self-publishing a series of books in the style of the great detective novels of yesteryear, with which I’d only recently become familiar. They’d be set in modern-ish times and follow the investigations of a great detective. At the same time, the idea was to pay homage to the comic books and graphic novels that I’d enjoyed since my childhood. So I chose to follow the investigations of Aaron Wise, a former masked vigilante with the deductive abilities of Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot combined with the memory of a quiz show champion.
Unlike Aaron Wise, who operated under the pseudonym of the enigmatic Mr. En, I don’t possess encyclopedic knowledge, nor do I have the intellectual skills to look over a crime scene and immediately deduce how the crime was committed and by what sort of person. While it might seem like the latter would be easy enough to accomplish – just lay out the clues that might otherwise go unnoticed and have my protagonist list them one-by-one to make him look clever – both parts required that I do my research.
When it came to my first book, After Mask: A Mr. En Mystery, making the details seem authentic was important to me, and I wanted to make certain aspects of the story feel grounded. I knew I wanted the victim to have died from a gunshot wound and that the weapon needed to work well with a noise suppressor, so I studied different handguns to learn which ones would make the least noise while using a silencer. I also looked up the meanings of prison tattoos to create a description of a suspect. Even the setting required extensive research. (That’s not to say I got everything right the first time. I’ll be making revisions to the second edition I plan to release later this year.) While significantly different, the next professional step on my writer’s journey required the same level of dedication to research.
A Feature Writer Needs to Be an Expert, But They Also Need to Do Their Homework
As I’ve mentioned in a previous post – and will no doubt bring up again in the future – I spent the better part of a year and a half as a feature writer for a genre entertainment website. It was an absolute blast when I started. That’s not to say it wasn’t challenging, but I initially got to choose my articles from a pool of suggested topics from our editors while getting to pitch my own ideas as well. It was that freedom to create that made the challenge worth it to me. Over time, however, the tone of the website changed, as did the culture. Eventually, the focus shifted to expertise with an even greater emphasis on SEO content. In other words, we were expected to write what we knew more than anything else. And we were required to provide a take on topics that had already been discussed to death on other sites.
While writing based on my expertise was fine at first, the Venn diagram of what I knew and what was popular intersected with a very short list of topics – specifically Star Trek: The Original Series and The Next Generation. The idea seemed to be that narrowing down the scope of the subjects that feature writers could cover would help us focus. Unfortunately, it had the opposite effect for me.
I started to feel there was very little I could say about TNG and TOS after a while, and my writing started suffering. Worse, I kept having to take deep dives for topical pearls that hadn’t been covered over and over again already. Even with 257 episodes (not counting Picard) and 10 movies between them, I just couldn’t find anything to talk about. I turned to my colleague Joshua Patton, a very talented and thoughtful feature writer, for advice. He quickly reaffirmed my philosophy that it helps to write about what interests me, but by then it was too late. That was when I knew it was time to move on.
Taking Lessons Learned from Features and Mysteries into Copywriting
Every step on a journey leads to another. While writing fiction remains my passion, I still need to pay the bills (something feature writing didn’t really help with anyway), and so I look forward to the next step on my personal, virtual travels…copywriting. As I take this next step, I’m hopeful because all the tools I’ve acquired in my previous endeavors were definitely serve me well in this new adventure.
One thing is certain, there are still many new topics I want to delve into and learn about. That will always interest me. It’s what keeps writers going, and it’s what makes our work worth reading.
mathewscheerwordsmith.com 
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