Researching Outside your Experience.

What kind of research do you think is necessary if you're to write outside your experience?

Everything. You should research everything that you can. Even if it's something you already know, RESEARCH! Research every small tiny thing, because what happens if you fuck up? Or there's a major plot hole in the situation or the person? Just research!

I mean it's simple enough said, right? Research. That's it, and yeah maybe you can live by that ideology for as long as you want but I don't think it's that simple. I mean, research something you don't know but want to know. I do that even if I'm not writing about it, I mean, the amount of Wikipedia articles in my history is amazing (I usually go into fixations of things at a certain time, a lot of the time its school shootings and it's not because I want to do one, (I'm very anti-gun if that helps my case) but the psychology of the killers are interesting). 

Though I believe that if you write and publish a piece from a point of view of something you don't experience that you need to distance yourself and help people understand that "this is what I assume what this situation/person is while going through a certain situation" and what not. The idea of researching outside of your experience often relates to the idea of 'write what you know' and 'what should you write'. Because by assuming that you shouldn't research and write what you know you limit your creative process, not only by limiting yourself with what you could write about but also who you could write about. 

In an article in Diversity in YA, J.A. Yang wrote on "Writing Outside Your Experience" (2011), Yang writes about his novel Exclusively Chloe (2009) a young adult book about a young sixteen-year-old Chloe-Grace who is famous and adopted from China. Yang gets people asking him what he knows about being a teenage girl, he justifies it by mentioning his twin sister, and he then gets asked if he was adopted, he's asked if he did any research about it, he mentions "I certainly did! I read articles, I looked up studies, I interviewed a few adoptees and their parents, and I kind of just projected what I thought it might feel like to be adopted. Did all that qualify me to write from an adoptee’s perspective? To be honest, I don’t know." (para. 3, 2011) 

This gives the thought, that even if you research so much about what you're writing about, are you still qualified to write from that perspective? In my second Nanowrimo novel The Last Life, I write from the perspective (while in the third person, it's still from this one person's perspective a majority of the time) of a Pakistani genderqueer person in their early 20s named Braxton Falco - the only things I can offer to that is similar of Brax's character is that I'm genderqueer and in my early 20s. I'm not Pakistani, I wasn't born male at birth and I don't live in an alternative universe Australia. Then again I have many other characters who have things different to me, one is a mechanic who has a brother - I am not a mechanic with a brother, the brother is asexual - I am not asexual or a male, the new friend a part of their crew is a science student - I am not a science student and lastly the last friend of Brax, a transwoman nursing student - and for the last time I am not a transwoman nursing student. 

Yang talks about his opinions about the idea of writing outside of your experience, it's been something that he struggles with, mentioning that he couldn't see Chloe-Grace as someone other than Chinese, he mentions about it that "that’s the culture I know and was raised in." If he wrote about someone from Russia, South Korea, or Guatemala (top 4 countries including China, who send children to be adopted to the U.S.) it wouldn't have been different but Yang would've "felt inauthentic as a writer." But adds to this that he still felt comfortable writing from the perspective of someone famous even though "the closest I’ve come to Hollywood is through television and the movie screen. And magazines, we can’t forget the weekly magazines." (para. 4, 2011). 

When I create my characters, I often create them from celebrities, so Braxton is based around Zayn Malik (ex-member of One Direction), and I feel that if I change the look of Brax they wouldn't be Brax. Though I was writing this story during the huge #Metoo movement that was happening, and the main antagonist is Roderick Silk, a politician, the president of Noxward, his celebrity look-alike was Kevin Spacey, a man who sexually assaulted a 14-year-old Anthony Rapp of Rent and Star Trek fame and came out as gay (that situation is another story for another time, TL;DR fuck Spacey). I was quick to change the face from Spacey to Ken Watanabe, a Japanese actor most known for Inception and Batman Begins. 

Spacey looks nothing like Watanabe, Spacey is white while Watanabe is Japanese. But I believe that I had a connection with Brax and his face, wanting to use Malik because of his appearance, whereas Spacey I really enjoyed his villains and even though no one will know who Silk is modeled after, I felt like it was a disservice of Rapp and the #MeToo movement to keep Spacey as the face. That, and I felt uncomfortable too. 

Yang's piece mentions more, and I realise this entry is hitting 1k words. But let me just say, research is important, even if you know what life is like as a young 20 something genderqueer pansexual kid from a moderately average size town in Australia with divorced parents, remarried parents, single parent, not everyone will be the same.