Let’s say you’re writing a scene in your story, a scene that takes place in a beauty salon. Now, if you yourself have spent 20 years working in beauty salons, maybe you can write that scene off the top your head. But if you’re like most of us, you have only passing exposure to life in a beauty salon. And if you’re like me, you’ve never actually gone inside one.

The classic way out of this, of course, is to “write what you know.” So if you don’t know beauty salons, don’t write them…

Yeah, right. <sarcastic sneer and rolls eyes>

Don’t get me wrong: it’s nice when you can write in a field in which you have some expertise. But if you plan to write more than one or two stories, you’ll need to get into the details of many fields and situations, settings and cultures, in which you have little or no direct knowledge. To some extent, this is always true of a fiction author, because you’re writing events that never actually occurred, in places that may not exist, in cultures that you may have made up, using technology that may never be developed, in times that have not even happened yet. How, pray tell, in the nature of reality do they expect you to “write what you know”?!

The best that we can hope for is to get it as close to plausible as we can.

In a famous display of writer’s integrity, guts, and stupidity, Harlan Ellison joined a street gang to research his first novel.

Yikes. Talk about writing what you know. Would you be willing to die just so you could write about what’s it’s like to be dead?

Not even Deborah Coonts is quite that bold. But her guest post “Writing Can Kill You," over at Seekerville, reminded me of that Ellison account. She tells some amusing anecdotes.

The moment I met [my character], I decided to kill her. But how?

Well, I’ve always liked sharks. And yes, you got it, once again, I knew very little about sharks, but, this time, I knew right where to go…

I approached the guard at the shark tank and casually asked, “If I threw a dead body in there, would the sharks eat it?”

… I could hear him asking himself, “Should I call security? Or 911? Security? 911?”

Definitely 911. Just keep her calm until the men in white coats arrive.

Me, I could never do research using that method. I take a different tack.