Things My Characters Know That I Don’t

My books feature characters with skills I don’t have.

They investigate crimes, so… obviously.

Hitch knows things about interrogation that I don't. Reese knows things about pathology that I don't. The rest of the team have their own areas of expertise.

And unfortunately for me, fictional characters don't come with all that knowledge already installed.

I have to learn it.

What you might not know is that to make these characters even remotely believable, I have to spend an insane amount of time following rabbits down rabbit holes, only to burst out, hours later, gasping for breath amid a spray of random bits of knowledge that I’ll only have to pick up later. 🙄

I put them in folders. I have a LOT of folders.

I have notes on all sorts of mad things.

Body language.

Fight choreography.

Physical trauma (divided by how the injury occurred).

One particularly weird folder bears the title “Practical Tips on Stuff and Things”.

That probably doesn’t sound helpful to you - but to me, it’s a gold mine of information about everything from the names of different parts of castles and the human skull to fin identification, runic alphabets, string theory and the stages of human decomposition.

I mean—do you know how to identify different kinds of sleeves? Or how to send a bouquet that is essentially a beautiful middle finger to someone you're mad at?

Every one of those odd little pages represents hours and hours of research.

Some are easier than others.

It’s not that hard to discover the names for different men’s haircuts, for example.

But how to survive being buried alive… that takes a lot more work.

And sometimes, all that work amounts to nothing at all.

I once spent 5 hours researching the construction of pre-Georgian chairs to write one sentence that I ultimately cut from the manuscript.

A writer’s life is like that.

But some subjects are rabbit holes in their own right. Whole days can disappear before you know it.
And yes, they have their own files, with multiple pages among them.

When Yip breaks in the Science Truck in Blood in the Dust, and Reese walks her through what they’ve found so far? That 624-word scene was the result of about 40 hours of research, and I didn’t actually use any of it.

I didn't need to put it onto the page.

I needed those forty hours behind the page.

Reese needed to sound like someone who knew exactly what they were talking about.

And for that to happen, I needed to know what they were talking about.

Then there’s the file called “Hitch’s Interrogation Techniques”.

I don’t even know how many hours that one represents, because I keep adding to it.
And it’s interesting, because that actually changed a lot about Hitch’s character.

I originally imagined him as young and stern, but the more I looked into this, I realised he needed to have experience if he was going to be good at it. That aged him up significantly. More than you think, actually. (🤫Spoilers!)

And this research has left some weird knowledge in my brain.

I know what happens to blood in snow.

I know what happens to your body when you drown.

All this is why my villains tend to be very human. Even when they’re Slipworlders.

It means my small talk is… interesting. There’s a lot of weird stuck up in there, believe me!

But here’s the thing: you, the reader, don’t need to know any of it.

Hitch does. Reese does. The whole team does.

I just need to write them in a way that makes you lean back and think, “Yep. This person knows what they’re doing.”