Years ago I wrote a novel about an Australian. I’d never been to Australia and had hardly even met anyone from that antipodean nation, but when I saw a young man from Down Under serving as human antenna for a radio playing “Eight Days a Week,” I was hooked.
“I like this song,” he admitted with an embarrassed grin, and I knew I had a story.
Not his story, mind you, but a story. A story of romance and adventure, of success and failure, of heroic actions and human frailty. A story of love, sorrow, and striving. Of loss and angst and hope. In other words, a human story. One of universal desires, everyday struggles, momentous decisions, and ultimate redemption. Every man’s dream—and every man’s nightmare. It was now my story, and I simply had to write it.
But how? Aren’t you supposed to write about what you know? And I knew almost nothing about Australia, much less Australians. I was an American living in Florida, and Aussies were few and far between. Yet I had to write this story.
Could I make it an American story? No. The plot wouldn’t work. Could I visit Australia to do my research? Ha! Not bloody likely. All I could do was read the few books on Australia I could get my hands on (this was in the age of dinosaurs, you understand, before the Internet) and try to immerse my mind and heart in the Australian culture as much as I could. And then I wrote a story about an Australian architect.
In other words, I winged it. But apparently I winged it well because a renowned London agent, who had been married to an Aussie and had lived in his native land for three years, loved the book and agreed to represent me as a result. She also told me later that, upon reading it, she had assumed I was Australian.
Does this mean that I recommend you should write about faraway places you know next to nothing about? Absolutely not. In fact, I would highly recommend against it no matter how much material you can find on the Internet about your chosen setting. My point is that it can be done if your heart is in the right place and your story is indeed universal, as all good stories in essence are, so that you don’t merely empathize with your character but, in both a mental and emotional sense, become that character.
So, you want to write a mystery that takes place in Bangkok? A thriller in London? A love story that begins off season on the beach in Cape Cod, but you’ve never left your home state of Iowa? Go for it. If your heart is set on it and you are in love with it, give it a try. Read about your chosen setting; search the web; try to find a real person from that area with whom to converse, either in person or online.
This last type of research may indeed be the most important. As luck would have it, soon after I finished my first draft of A Bit of Sun, I met an Australian architect who begrudgingly agreed to read a few chapters at the insistence of his wife, who had become my friend. I only gave him chapters that took place in Sydney, with which he was quite familiar, and which I thought might need a few adjustments for the sake of authenticity. After reading them, he requested that I let him read the entire manuscript. With more than a little trepidation, I did.
Alan really got into the story and was very helpful to me in regard to certain quirks of Aussie vocabulary, such as using the term “barman” instead of “bartender,” and also helped with architectural terminology and aspects of the story that might fall under governmental regulations. Needless to say, I took his recommendations to heart when revising the story before I sent it off to a literary agent. Nonetheless, even Alan said that no one would believe I hadn’t at least lived in Australia for a few years.
So the point is, if you really want to do it, you can. And successfully, too. But remember: authentic vocabulary and description are not enough to make your story real. It must be real in your heart before it can come alive on the page.
© 2017 Ann Henry, all rights reserved.
Photo: Bon Voyage © 2014 Ann Henry, all rights reserved.