Complex Numbers

Invisible Infrastructure

We write, we’re all writers. What subject would you like to write about, but haven’t yet. Genre? Type of character? Location? What? Tell me why.

"Write what you know."

This advice is overstated and misinterpreted probably more than any other exhortation to writers. Taken literally, you'd only write about things that you've done or said, or that happened to you. Science fiction would be a vast deserted wasteland. Steampunk would be nonexistent. Fantasy would be incredibly boring. As for murder mysteries... well. We'd all know what you did.

Don't listen to this advice. It's relentlessly limiting, like "never end a sentence with a preposition" or "don't start your story with unattributed dialogue."

I'd turn it around, personally: "Know what you write."

But I've ranted about this before, I think. I'm going to talk today about writing what I know. What I know - what I studied in school, and what I built a career on - was the design of roads, parking lots, drainage systems, water distribution networks, and sanitary sewer lines.

There's a lot of fiction out there centered around professions. Law, medicine, police, detective, forensics, politics, journalism... there's even a good bit, mostly in the realm of science fiction, about the sexier branches of engineering: aerospace, for instance. But when it comes to the kind of engineering that you interact with every single day? Nothing. Hell, you don't even think about all the work that's gone into the design of a simple residential road. This is a good thing, from my perspective; that means the engineer has done their job right. You notice only when you have to drive through a puddle because someone misplaced a decimal point in the storm drain calculations, and then you curse us all.

Oh, there's a reason for this lack: there's not a lot of innovation involved, nor conflict. No drama. I mean, there is some, and I know this more than most, but it's not the kind of drama you'd watch on TV - unless a dam breaks or a sewer main explodes or some such, the stakes aren't exactly high.

So I always thought, well, maybe I'd find a way to raise the stakes. Still not sure how, or I'd have done it already. And it's not like I want to build a writing career on it; I'm too busy learning all kinds of things so that I know what I'm writing about. But I'd like to do it just because it hasn't, as far as I know, been done.