Screenwriting : The Writer’s Bluff: Knowing Just Enough by Maxim Marukh

The other day, a buddy of mine called me a well-read person. Said I knew a lot of stuff from various fields that the average person wouldn't care about. At first, I was flattered, but then I confessed – I'm a writer. My buddy didn't get it, so I explained.

Like most writers, my knowledge is broad and shallow. I know everything and nothing. It comes with the job. Every book is a miniature world, a quasi-universe, and you are its god. And like any god, you need to know a bit about your world. A dash of this, a pinch of that. Small authentic strokes that paint the illusion of reality. And between those strokes – emptiness.

Scientists are the opposite. Their knowledge is deep and specialized. Their profession demands it. A cosmologist who knows everything about the universe (okay, not everything, but what's within his expertise) might be a complete novice in history, literature, music. And that's fine. It's normal for him. He tackles different tasks. A surgeon slicing up ten people a day doesn't need to be a psychiatrist.

A writer does. But just a bit, just the surface. How does it work? My buddy asked the same question. Let me explain.

I won't delve into banalities like: if you're describing a car, you need to know which way the ignition key turns (hint: clockwise on all makes). Or that in England they drive on the left. Proofreaders will fix the factual stuff later (unless it's an iceberg-sized bug that sinks the Titanic of your plot). That's all clear.

Let's dig deeper. We're looking for a sharp trope for Tom. A metaphor, an allegory, a hyperbole – anything. Tom is fat. Okay, let's open the database, what do we have on fatties? Right off the bat: bulimia, Jabba the Hutt, gastric bypass (saw it on TLC), atomic bomb (in Japan, I think, read somewhere), black hole (heard it on Discovery). Black holes have potential.

Next, the mighty Google and Wikipedia come into play. Five minutes in, I'm knee-deep in black hole articles. Another twenty and I know that a dead star is a supermassive cosmic body that sucks in all matter, including light quanta. Like Tom's body. Close, but too cliché. Let's complicate it. Read on…

Twenty more minutes and I know about gravitational lensing. Of course, not everything, just the surface. But enough for a trope.

So here it goes: “Tom was so fat, just a few more pounds and he'd be taking solo group photos – gravitational lensing would blur everyone else out”.

Got a hyperbole. Too fancy? Maybe. But my buddy will appreciate the breadth of my knowledge, and a cosmologist will get a kick out of the joke. Two readers with one stone.

Now, the last step – making sure the joke is unique. Google to the rescue again, and the next fifteen minutes I’m browsing sites with fat mom jokes and keywording “fatties” and “lensing.” No one’s joked about lensing yet, you can check. Breathe out – all clear.

So, an hour for one original metaphor. Too much? Too little? And some people wonder why books take so long to write.

After a while, I'll forget about lensing, leaving just a trace in memory. A hook. It will resurface when needed. And it’s not the only one, because while reading about lensing, I picked up more bits. Usually, after a couple of hours, my browser has a layer cake of bookmarked articles: from pygmies to Pygmalion.

So it turns out that a writer's erudition is all on the Internet, in libraries, in books and magazines, on TV and radio, in buddies' stories, in tales and gossip. Heard somewhere, someone wrote, remembered somewhere.

Recall -> dig -> read -> learn -> write -> forget.

Probably why physicists rarely write books. They’re drillers, going deep. Lyricists are plowers, spreading wide. The broader the knowledge, the richer the text.

Of course, there are exceptions, and when scientists pick up the pen – we get amazing stuff like science fiction. Or popular science. Or “A Young Doctor's Notebook.” Crichton, Sagan, Bulgakov, Dick, Lem, Asimov – proof. These guys knew their stuff and could spread wide. And there are popularizers – cool folks, respect to them. They do work as important (if not more) than their researcher colleagues. And they do it with flair. Right now, there's a trend for popular science in America; books by Krauss, Tyson, Dawkins, Greene, and Hawking are bestsellers year after year.

My buddy thought for a moment and said: Max, better to know what you're writing about than to write about what you know. I replied: when you know what you're writing about – that's a scientific article. When you write about what you know – that's fiction. The main task of any fiction is to entertain. Everyone entertained: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Steinbeck, Hemingway. And Dawkins. And Plato. And Nietzsche. What doesn't entertain doesn't top bestseller lists.

A driller writes an article and boosts his Hirsch index. But to entertain, you need to be a plower. You need to know a bit of everything – and nothing in particular. Because treasures aren't deep, they’re always on the surface, a half-spade down. And sometimes you have to plow a whole field to find one gold coin.