Write What You Know or Write What You Love?
They say, “Write what you know.”
So naturally, I decided to set my first novel on a remote Pacific island I’d never been to, in a mountainous rainforest few people have ever explored, and filled it with characters based on the extinct hominid species homo floresiensis, of which we have only scant archeological evidence dating back 60,000 years.
Am I brave? Or just stupid?
Time will tell. But I’ve always loved wild, natural settings and struggles to survive. I’ve always been fascinated by genetics and human evolution. And I’ve long wondered, “What if one of the many different species of humans that lived in the past still lived today?”
So, when it came time to write a novel, I simply decided to combine all the weird things I’m interested in. And while I was at it, I hoped to address some of the more problematic tropes I’d seen used in first contact/lost world-type stories.
I’ll admit, however, that I’ve had some doubts since then.
Because traveling to New Guinea wasn’t possible, I visited rainforests a little closer to home for inspiration: El Yunque National Forest in Puerto Rico and Hoh Rainforest in Washington state’s Olympic National Park. I’ve researched Papuan culture, geology, ecology and wildlife. I’ve read everything I could get my hands on about homo floresiensis. (Here are some of my favorite non-fiction books I read during my research of these wide-ranging topics.)
I’ve also cut out parts of the novel that I ultimately decided could be better told by someone with first-hand, internal cultural knowledge of western New Guinea. This decision was influenced in part by the amazing speculative fiction writer Lesley Nneka Arimah, author of What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky, who I had as a teacher at the 2018 Miami Writers Institute and who briefly discussed this issue in class. (You can read a Twitter thread of her thoughts on writing “the Other” here.)
Finally, I’m in the process of finding beta readers who are from New Guinea and/or have a background in anthropology or archeology. (If you fall into either group and want to volunteer to read the novel, please contact me.)
At the end of the day, I hope I’ve done a good job bringing a very real place and a very fantastical premise to life. I hope someday the novel will be published so readers can decide for themselves.