I was sort of taken aback by the question, and I shouldn’t have been.
“How did you research the book Selfie, and what steps did you take to make it authentic?”
My first thought (and I have had this one since I started writing) was “I am a terrible fraud!” because I couldn’t remember doing any research for this book.
And then my actual brain kicked in (as opposed to my panic brain), and I realized that I’d been researching this book before I started writing.
When I was a kid—eight, nine, ten—my parents made three trips to the Pacific Northwest. Oregon, Washington, Canada—I fell deeply in love.
When I was a teenager, I was one of the deciding voices to send my marching band to Victoria, Canada for our trip in my senior year, because my burning passion never dimmed.  As an adult, I’ve talked Mate into taking me up there twice—for our 10thanniversary, and as part of a business trip—and that area and I renewed our affair.
Oh yes, from Goose Mountain to the Seattle Fish Market to Puget Sound, I have researched that area simply by being in love.  Now, that doesn’t mean I didn’t have to look up some maps—because my head for directions is limited to three coordinates: Pure Fucking Magic.


“How did you get to Vancouver, Amy?” “Pure Fucking Magic.” “How did you get to the airport, Amy?” “Pure Fucking Magic.” As far as I’m concerned it’s the only way to travel.  But just because I need a map doesn’t mean my heart doesn’t live there, so I’m good with PFM as a means of transportation.
The real research, the research that informed my descriptions of how much I love the fog or why someone would want to be a fisherman when it’s backbreaking work—that was already done.
The same applies for Connor’s profession—actor.
Well, the internal work was done as a kid.  I wanted to be an (picture this word in lights with decorations and glitter) actor.
Junior high, high school, college—it was all I could think about. My parents convinced me I could never do it—didn’t have the looks, didn’t have the talent, didn’t have the willpower to stay away from cookies—all of which was probably true. I became a teacher instead, which was even better because not only could I act out the books but the kids were required by law to be there. It was glorious.
So I understood what made Connor tick—but what about his day to day? Amy, the closest you’ve been to a television set is Universal Studios—how could you possibly know what his day was like?
Well, this goes back about twelve years, and a little show—you may have heard of it?Supernatural.
Yes, I’m still somewhat obsessed.
Anyway—back when I was teaching and the administration was killing me and the kids were ungrateful and I didn’t know how my teeny paycheck was going to feed my children much less send them through college, I would sit at my computer and pretend to write.
And I’d watch anything related to this show. This included gag reels, interviews with the cast, convention footage, outtakes, interviews with the directors, “making of” clips, interviews with the writers, anecdotes, the makeup trailer, film schedules, the producers talking about casting or story arcs—you name the angle for the production of a small network television show, and I was all over that. I just wanted to know.  I had actually done similar things for a lot of the movies and shows I’d loved—I wanted to know whyFirefly was canceled, or the logic behind Buffy’s death at the end of fourth season, or how the dog escaped immolation in Independence Day. Knowing how real life and imaginary life collide and change the shape of the other has always been fascinating to me—and I was more than ready to explore that on the page.
When it came time to write Connor’s day-to-day life in Wolf’s Landing, I was there.
So what research did I do?
My whole life has been research.
And that brings me to my point.
Writers are often told, “Write what you know.”
I think we need to refine that idea a little bit. If all I wrote was what I know intimately, I’d have to keep my stories incredibly small–not that I don’t sometimes, but we’re talking a tiny house and a relatively circumscribed set of destinations in my day.  I wouldn’t write comedies because real life has no punch lines. I wouldn’t have writtenThe Locker Room because I’m not an athlete. I wouldn’t have written Keeping Promise Rock because I was never in the military and I tend to fall off horses and break bones.
As much as I love music, I never would have written Beneath the Stain because as many songs as I’ve sung until my throat was raw, as many “Top 500” lists as I’ve read, as many interviews and biographical movies as I’ve seen, I’ve never been up on the stage, screaming until my heart explodes.
And as much as I love movies, the theater, and TV, I never would have written Connor, because Connor is beautiful, and I am not. Connor is talented in ways I am not. And Connor is heartbroken in ways I pray never to be.
But I love knowing about music, about sports, about the military and horse ranching. I love knowing about visual storytelling. I love studying these tgubgs. I love watching standup comics and romantic comedies and situation comedies. I love watching 30 for 30and Invincible and Wimbledon and I even love working out. I love stories about soldiers and stories about horses and God, Goddess, and other, do I love music and movies and TV.
These are the things that inform my writing. These are the things that light the passion in my blood.
So I think maybe, instead of “Write what you know,” we should think about it more as “Write what you love.”
Love isn’t always rational. My love of Puget Sound defies description. I can’t tell you why I can listen to “In One Ear” sixty-thousand times, or why three paragraphs at the end of Exile’s Gate have changed the way I think about writing and character and good and evil forever.  I can’t tell you why I’ve watched eleven seasons of Supernatural even though I’ve had to stop in the middle of the last five seasons and catch my breath until the show no longer hurt my heart.
Nobody can tell you why they read the same books again and again and again, until they know every word, know every nuance, can imagine every moment.
It must be love.
Write what you love—and like with real love, you will come to know the object of your affection better with every word.

I love words—most writers do. There’s something magical that happens when both sides of a writer’s brain conjoin.  The language centers and the imagination centers–which are in opposite hemispheres—work together to create a reality that did not exist before phoneme and morpheme collaborated to paint a picture.  Suddenly words shape the things we imagine, and the things we imagine search desperately for…
Words.
Words equal ideas.
In a lecture about Orwell’s essay Politics and the English Language and his book 1984  I used to do the following exercise with my classes—everybody follow along.
Okay, everybody think of the word “color”.  What comes to mind?
Now everyone think of the word “red”.  What do you think about?
Now think about “dark red”.  What do you think about now?
Now think about “candy-apple red.”  What images do you get?
Now think about “crimson”, or “vermillion”, or “burgundy”.  What do you think aboutnow?


You may notice that the more specific word gets the more specific image in your head. The more specific word gets the more specific idea. And the more vague the word, the more amorphous the idea.
So what if suddenly, one day, we were told that in order to “simplify” our discourse, in order to make it so everybody could understand what one person was saying, we had to eliminate the words “crimson”, “vermillion”, and “burgundy” from our vocabularies?
What would happen to our mental images of those things? Where would they go? Would there be another combination of words that could bring them back?
Probably not.
In Orwell’s 1984, the hero worked for the Ministry of Truth, which (among other functions) was in charge of eliminating all but government approved words. One of the first things the Ministry of Truth went after was the word “bad” and all of its synonyms—so anything from “undesirable” to “catastrophic” to “devastating” to “heartbreaking” was all labeled with various degrees of “ungood.”  Sure, there was “plus ungood” and “double plus ungood” and “double double plus ungood”—but think about it. Think about the things that our brains do when someone uses the word “heartbreaking” as opposed to the word “double plus ungood”. Think about the emotional layers we’ve removed, the moments of the reader’s or listener’s experience that we’ve taken out of the equation, by taking away the word.
I know that in modern publishing it’s important to go for clean and uncluttered prose—to not allow ourselves the luxury of rolling around for too long in the glory of the words. I’ve recently been forced to go back into my own writing archives, and have cringed at the raging bouts of purple prose that I fed with bullshit and watered with my own self-gratification and ego.  So yes—an overindulgence in words can obscure our meaning, can blunt the edge of the emotion we’re trying to use like a blade.
An overindulgence in words can become ungood.
But if we’re paring down our prose, honing our verbal knives, let’s never forget that the precise word can do what a paragraph of vague explanation cannot. Be leery of trying to appease someone—even a beta reader or an editor—by eliminating a precise, perfect word because it has become rare or little used.  As the people who traffic in words, it’s our job to occasionally wander off of the freeways of the basic, workaday words like “rotting”, “wonderful”, and “chill” and into the little used footpaths of delicious words like “minatory”, “exemplary”, and “coolth” (which really is a word, my editor assures me so.)
And never, ever let someone tell you that we need to “eliminate a word from our vocabulary”.
Even if it’s a bad word. Even if it’s a word of such horrible implications that we wish mankind never had the capacity to think this word.  Even if the word will never rattle from our keyboards or be uttered from our lips—it needs to stay in our vocabulary.  Because if we have no word for that kind of evil, then we have no concept of the evil itself. And if we have no concept of the evil—we have no way to fight it. If words are our weapons, we need to know the weapons of the ideas we abhor, so we can hone our words.
If we have no words to express an idea, to cut to the bone, to heal with a thought, to right a wrong, to fix a broken thing—we are left as inarticulate as apes, flailing our fists in the air, wreaking physical destruction when the appropriate words would have made angels of us instead.
Writers—yes, genre writers too—are the keepers of words. We are the ones who plant them, nourish them, watch them grow into great and wonderful—and hopefully diverse—fruit. It is our job as gardeners to grow and appreciate the various trees—even if it is a fruit we cannot stomach and will not eat. If we cannot see the tree, understand the tree, we will not know it for the evil it is when it springs up as a volunteer among our midst. To raze that tree down and burn it to the root will only make us blind and ignorant of the harm it can do.  We need to be smarter than that. If the fruit of the tree is bad, we need to grow better trees, trees people want to eat from in order to feed their hungry minds.
We mustn’t let anyone—politicians, critics, parents—carelessly prune and decimate our words.
If words are our calling, our vocation, our faith, this is, in its way, something sacred. It’s a trust our future generations place in us to not let ideas die.
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