Writing what you know

It’s an old cliche that you should write what you know. And there’s also the old counter-cliche, that this is too damn limiting for a writer.
Although I do side more with the counter-cliche, knowing stuff can really help writing. It’s not so much a matter of confining yourself to your life experience as importing it to whatever you’re working on. Particularly details.

Case in point, the owl in the picture above (from a Mensa event last month). During the presentation by the Greenville Zoo, someone played a tape of owl calls and the bird responded. What was striking was that it didn’t flap its wings or start, it simply turned its head. Slowly. More like a machine than a startled living thing.
I didn’t know owls moved like that. If I ever have to use an owl in a story of mine, I’ll try to work that detail in, just because it’s neat.
Likewise, I was watching our garden last week and saw a honey bee come to rest on a clover blossom. Only it didn’t rest because the flower swayed from side to side under the weight of the bee. When the bee flew off with its pollen, the clover vibrated for a couple of seconds from the release before it came to rest.
I could do a story with someone sitting in the field, watching the bees, without mentioning that little detail. But it would be a better story if I threw it in.
The great animedirector Hayao Miyazaki made the same point in an interview: when one of his films required a snake fall out of the tree on someone, he had to go out, find a snake and let it fall. The animators were city kids and they’d never had the experience of seeing it happen.
In the same vein, back in biology class I had the privilege of watching a small constrictor (I’m inclined to say hog snake, but I can’t swear to it after so many years) attack a mouse. It’s the first time I’ve literally seen something move faster than the eye can see—a quick blur, then there’s just a snake coiled around the rodent.
In a novel I worked on back in the 1990s (regrettably never finished, despite consuming several years of work), I had a fight by moonlight. I went out to the neighborhood park under the full moon just to so I could gauge what you can see in that kind of light.
Little details probably won’t break or make a story, but they can’t but enhance it.