Beyond What You Know: Research as Ritual, Curiosity as Craft
"Write what you know" was never meant to be a warning label. But for many writers, it’s felt like one.
We assume it means: stay in your lane. Don't write beyond your own experience. Keep it close, keep it safe. And for those of us whose lived experience already feels too raw or too tangled, the message becomes even heavier: maybe you're not allowed to write at all.
But I believe writing isn’t about staying inside a fixed identity. Writing allows us to reach toward truth: sometimes messy, sometimes unfamiliar, sometimes imagined entirely. “Write what you know” can begin with personal experience, but it deepens through emotional resonance, attentive research, and the kind of curiosity that draws you beyond the edges of what’s familiar.
When we write from our lived experiences, we ground our stories in truth and then expand them with care, complexity, and imagination.
Beyond What You Know: Research as Ritual, Curiosity as Craft
What You Know Isn't Just Your Life
You know more than you think. You know longing. You know shame. You know the complicated quiet between two people who don't have the language to say what they mean. These are the truths that shape fiction more than any profession, setting, or historical detail. Maybe you haven’t been abandoned in space but you have been the last one to be picked up after school.
Psychologists often refer to emotional schemas, which are core patterns developed over time that shape how we interpret the world. As a writer, these patterns are often your most consistent material. Whether you're writing a 16th-century queen or a futuristic bounty hunter, those underlying emotions—fear of abandonment, hunger for power, desire for connection—are what make your characters believable.
So yes, write what you know. But remember: what you know isn’t limited to facts. It includes the invisible truths you’ve carried for years without language. The interior maps you’ve drawn from grief, hope, resentment, longing. The intuitive understandings your body holds, like how your breath shortens in a crowded room, or how your hands shake when you finally speak what was never meant to be said.
Emotional knowledge doesn’t require a matching biography. It requires presence. It requires attention. Even if your character’s life looks nothing like yours, you can still meet them in the spaces where fear pulses, where desire stirs, where memory distorts and reveals. That’s where the real knowing lives.
Emotional Truth Over Factual Accuracy
When we talk about truth in fiction, we often confuse it with facts. But facts are slippery. They shift depending on who’s telling them, who’s listening, what was remembered, and what was blocked out entirely.
Ask three siblings about the same moment in childhood and you’ll get three entirely different versions. Not because anyone is lying, but because perception is shaped by role, context, emotion, and need. Memory is not a fixed recording. It’s a story we keep rewriting based on who we became.
Psychologists call this “memory reconsolidation.” Every time we recall something, we aren't simply retrieving it; we are reshaping it, layering it with new meaning or pain or interpretation. This is why writing about lived experience can feel unstable. There is no single truth to transcribe. Just the version you’re holding in this moment, with your current tools and your current heart.
In fiction, this gives you incredible freedom. You don’t have to prove something happened a certain way. You only have to make the emotional truth ring clear. Not what happened, but what it meant. Not what was said, but what was felt beneath it.
That’s why even imagined stories can feel more honest than memoir. And why stories shaped by research and care can reflect someone’s lived experience more closely than their own memory of it.
Specificity, Synchronicity, and the Story Beneath
Truth in fiction lives in what resonates. It asks us to write with enough honesty and specificity that the reader feels something shift. Specificity lives in what holds weight: a detail a character returns to when everything else is noise, a sound or scent that carries memory without explanation. Research guides you toward the brand of crackers someone buys when they’re spiraling, the sound of a train that only runs twice a week, the particular smell of a street after rain. These become anchors. They root the story in a world that feels textured and true.
And sometimes, the right detail doesn’t come from research at all. Sometimes it finds you. A phrase in a book you almost didn’t pick up. A photo, a name, a line of dialogue that appears just when you need it. Synchronicity shows up when you’re paying attention. It reminds you that story lives everywhere, and that something in you is already reaching toward it.
Writers often experience synchronicity not just in what shows up during the research process, but in how the world of the story begins to mirror its characters. A meaningful object may echo something unspoken. A recurring detail might reflect an internal conflict before the character can name it. These moments are connective tissue. A photograph. A broken clasp. The way a lamp flickers out just as doubt sets in. Whether intentional or instinctual, this kind of resonance helps your reader feel the emotional undercurrent without needing it explained. It’s the story speaking through the world around the character, making the interior visible without flattening it.
The more attuned you are to these subtle alignments, the more dimensional your story becomes. Facts can support this work, but they exist within a much larger weave of meaning, memory, intuition, and emotional clarity.
Research Is a Doorway
Research begins with a question worth following. It grows through curiosity, attention, and a willingness to be changed by what you learn.
Many writers stall here. Not because they don’t care, but because they care so much they’re afraid to get it wrong. Maybe you want to write a character who shares an identity with someone you love, but you’re scared it won’t be true to everyone’s experience. Maybe you’re drawing from your own family or background, but worry that others will challenge your perspective.
That fear is valid. But it’s not a reason to silence yourself.
Stories rooted in lived connection deserve to exist. If you’re writing a character who shares something with someone close to you—a sibling, a friend, a version of yourself at fifteen—you’re allowed to explore that. What matters is the care you bring to it. Are you letting this character unfold with emotional depth and room to surprise you, or are you writing toward an expected version of them? Are you following the story’s pull, or are you including them out of obligation, hoping it will make the work feel more complete?
Writing from a place of love is different than writing from a place of assumption. When you approach a character with empathy, nuance, and a willingness to learn more than you already know, that shows. It shows in the prose. It shows in the gaps you leave for contradiction and complexity.
Good research teaches us how to see. It’s an invitation to step into someone else’s rhythm. Their rituals. Their realities.
Done well, research becomes a kind of reverence. It asks you to listen more closely. To ask better questions. To follow the threads that make the world more textured, more believable, more alive. You’re not just looking for plot devices. You’re learning how a character might make tea, or what they might carry in their pockets, or how it feels to walk through their neighborhood at dusk.
Sometimes that means reading memoirs or academic texts. But often, it’s softer and stranger than that. It’s pulling blueprints for a Craftsman-style house so you can picture how light moves through the rooms, how the floorboards creak, how sound carries from one space to another. It’s googling what blooms along Southern highways in June. It’s standing in the paint aisle for thirty minutes trying to decide what color your character would repaint the kitchen. It’s following a sensory thread until it tells you something about who they are.
This kind of research lives at the intersection of accuracy and atmosphere. It grounds the story in something tangible. It gives it scent, weight, weather. And when it’s woven into your writing with care, it becomes indistinguishable from voice. From tone. From truth.
This is how you earn your reader’s trust—not by proving expertise, but by showing that you’ve paid attention to the world you’re building, to the emotional logic of your characters, to the quiet details that make something feel real.
Curiosity Is a Compass
Curiosity asks you to follow the thread, even if you’re not sure where it leads. A stray sentence in a podcast. A roadside plant you suddenly want to name. A dream that lingers longer than it should. These are not distractions—they’re signals. They might not make it onto the page exactly, but they shape the questions you're asking and the lens through which you’re seeing.
In The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron recommends returning to your morning pages to mine them for what keeps showing up. What words repeat. What images won’t leave you alone. What themes, questions, or names rise again and again, even when you’re not trying to write about them. That’s your material. That’s your story, tugging at you from the edges.
Keep a curiosity log. Let one obsession lead to another. Let a single image derail your outline in the best way. Look at your browser tabs. The notes app entries you don't remember writing. The books stacked on your nightstand that seem unrelated until they aren’t. Your story doesn’t need to justify its interests. It just needs you to follow them.
This matters even more in revision. When a scene starts to feel dry or distant—like you're editing the life out of it instead of into it—bring in something you're obsessed with. One of my writers felt like she was cutting away pieces of herself while revising an Act II heist sequence, so I suggested she add in something fun that she loves, like maybe a dog. The characters are now planning the heist and trying to wrangle a stray puppy. It can add tension, flavor, and heart. The things we love will feed the story in ways you can’t predict. They don’t need to be symbolic. They just need to be yours.
Sometimes that curiosity leads to clarity. Sometimes it leads to complication. But either way, it leads somewhere honest. Somewhere alive.
Interview Real People (Yes, You Can)
One of the most overlooked forms of research is the simplest: talking to real people.
While writing my gothic novel set off the Oregon coast, I visited a coastal lighthouse and met with a local tour guide. I asked him about the weather, the history, the strange little details most people overlook—and he gave me more than just answers. He offered textures. Sensory moments. Things I hadn’t thought to ask that ended up deepening the setting and giving the story a kind of grounded eeriness I couldn’t have invented on my own.
Janel Kolby, author of Winterfolk, conducted interviews with unhoused individuals while writing her novel. She approached them with respect and openness, asking for permission to listen, to learn, and to understand. That kind of research doesn’t just inform character—it shifts your entire relationship to the story you’re telling.
Casey McQuiston used Airbnb Experiences to inform the setting of The Pairing—booking casual tours with everyday people across Europe. Instead of only relying on guidebooks, they listened to locals, followed their curiosities, and let those small, human-scale moments shape the bones of the story.
You can do this too:
Talk to a hospice nurse about what death actually looks and feels like.
Interview a hockey player about what it’s like to step onto the ice for a championship game.
Ask a tattoo artist about the weirdest placement request they’ve ever had.
Sit down with a sibling, a friend, an elder, and ask them how they remember a shared event.
Be transparent about what you're writing. Let people opt in or out. Respect their time. And never, ever treat someone else’s trauma as a shortcut to authenticity. But do remember: most people love to talk about what they know, if they feel safe being asked.
How to Begin: Research That Feeds the Story
Start with the questions. What do you need to know to write this character, this moment, this setting with more precision or care? Don’t aim to master the entire topic—just find the piece your character would notice.
Match the method to the need:
Writing a setting? Try Google Street View, Zillow listings, or historical maps.
Need character details? Look at vintage catalogs, fashion blogs, or watch TikToks from people in that career/subculture.
Want to capture a worldview? Read memoirs, listen to interviews, follow social media accounts run by people with lived experience.
Write as you research. Don’t hoard information. Let it trickle into the prose as mood, metaphor, or rhythm. Research should change your writing, not just hover next to it.
Books as Research Tools
Before you dive into archives or blueprints or weather maps, don’t forget one of the most powerful research tools already on your shelf: mentor texts. Read fiction like a writer. Choose books that reflect something you’re trying to understand—whether it’s how to handle a nonlinear timeline, how to show grief without flattening a character, how to evoke atmosphere without overexplaining, or how to write intimacy that feels earned.
Pay attention to the mechanics beneath the emotion. Where does the pacing slow, and why? How does the author signal backstory without slipping into exposition? What kinds of metaphors do they reach for when describing anger, longing, or fear? What sensory details are doing the heavy lifting? These choices aren’t accidental. They’re craft decisions you can learn from, adapt, and reshape to suit your own voice.
Mentor texts don’t have to match your genre. They just need to make you feel something—and make you curious about how they did it.
Tools and Sources for Writers
People and Lived Experience
Reddit (look for AMAs, threads about specific life experiences)
TikTok and YouTube vloggers who document jobs, hometowns, cultures
Memoirs, personal essays, oral histories (archive.org, StoryCorps)
Places and Atmosphere
Google Street View (especially historical versions via Wayback Machine or “timeline” slider)
Library of Congress digital collections
Zillow, Airbnb, or local real estate sites for houses/floorplans
Weather Underground (for historical weather data)
Time Periods & Culture
Newspapers.com or Chronicling America (for archival news stories)
JSTOR (register for a free account to read up to 100 scholarly articles online per month)
Fashion History Timeline (by FIT)
Sears Catalog Archive, Vogue Runway, or Etsy for era-accurate clothing and objects
Occupations and Systems
Occupational Outlook Handbook (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics)
Job interview forums and threads (Glassdoor, Reddit, Quora)
Professional association websites (e.g., AAMFT for therapists, ALA for librarians)
Plants, Animals, Ecology
iNaturalist (community-led wildlife and plant observations)
Local extension offices or university agriculture sites
National Park Service or Forest Service databases
A Note on the Line Between Curiosity and Avoidance
Research is seductive. It can also become a delay tactic. If you find yourself spending hours choosing your character’s toothbrush but haven’t written the scene they use it in? That’s your cue to pause.
Ask yourself:
Am I researching to deepen the story—or to delay writing it?
What question am I trying to answer, and do I have enough to write the next part honestly?
Have I talked to someone who’s lived this experience—or am I circling it from a distance?
Write what you know. And write what you ache to know. Write what you’re still unraveling. What feels holy. What feels dangerous. What feels like it could change you if you let it.
And when you don’t know something? Learn it. Chase it. Sink into it with your whole self. Let it shift what you thought you understood.
That’s not just good craft. That’s devotion. To the story, to the process, to the quiet threads of wonder that won’t leave you alone.
Let your curiosity be sacred. Let it be messy. Let it take you down strange rabbit holes and into late-night spirals and toward places you never expected to end up. Let yourself be surprised by what you love. Let yourself be surprised by what the story asks of you.
You’re allowed to follow the things that don’t make sense yet. You’re allowed to get it wrong, to learn, to circle back. That’s what writers do. We gather. We listen. We notice. We return.
And through that return, we make something truer than facts alone could ever hold.
No matter your path—hobbyist, hopeful, or building a writing career—there’s a place for you inside The Residency.
Choose the path that fits your season. With structure, support, and community, you’ll build momentum and keep showing up for your work.
Tiffany Grimes (she/they) is the founder of Burgeon Design and Editorial, a queer founded boutique editing and design house for brave creatives. At Burgeon, we specialize in book editing, coaching, and web design for the individualists, nonconformists, and trailblazers of the literary world. If you’re a maverick, outsider, rebel, renegade, dissenter, disruptor, or free spirit, you’ve come to the right place.
