The age-old refrain “write what you know” is often bandied about without a lot of thought given to the actual meaning. Usually attributed to Mark Twain, the line requires some interpretation. After all, can’t one know something from research? Isn’t there room for empathy and imagination?
To both these questions I’d say yes and no.
While it is possible to know something from research, great care should be taken when writing about experiences with which you are less personally familiar. Empathy does not equal experience. To write about hearing loss, for example, without being hard of hearing myself, would mean projecting my own thoughts onto others’ experiences.
When I first considered writing a hero who was hard of hearing, I did so with serious deliberation. My husband is hard of hearing, and I’d never want to malign him in any way.
Beyond that, misrepresenting the hard of hearing and Deaf community could do more harm than good. While I might intend to bring awareness and understanding of a minority group, if I were to write something wrong, my attempt could backfire.
Because of this, I felt I could not, in good conscience, write from that character’s point of view. While I have spent copious amounts of time around people with hearing loss, I cannot say I know what it feels like.
Twice a month, I volunteer for the SNAP (Special Needs Adult Program) in my region. Many participants are Deaf or hard of hearing, using sign language to communicate. I respect and admire these individuals and have learned so much from each of them, though my own sign language skills remain abysmal. Combining this with almost two decades of being with my hard of hearing husband, I understand what it’s like to socialize with individuals who have experienced hearing loss. However, because I have not experienced hearing loss, I didn’t feel comfortable writing from the point of view of a hard of hearing character.
Instead, I focused on writing what I have experienced. I know what it is like to repeatedly check my teeth in the mirror because I fell in love with someone who always watches my mouth when I speak. I walk on his right side because the nerves in his left ear do not respond to any noise stimuli. When he speaks, he does so out of one side of his mouth, unconsciously directing the sound toward his better ear. When we designed his home office, we put the desk in such a way that he’d be aware of anyone attempting to communicate with him from the doorway.
I know my husband can’t hear well in a crowded restaurant, and how he likes to sleep on his right side so he never has to use earplugs. When he accidentally put his AirPods through the washing machine, we were only worried about whether the right one still worked. I know these details without any research.
I know him so well, and love him so much, I couldn’t not write about hearing loss. It affects me, and my daily life, practically every moment I’m awake. And making an individual with hearing loss the hero was the only thing I could do, because he is the hero in my story.
I felt I could authentically write from the point of view of someone who falls in love with someone who was hard of hearing. Because that’s what I did. That was my story. Whether this decision was right or wrong is up to the reader.
I asked multiple people with hearing loss to read my novel Mr. Nice Spy before it was published, and I took their feedback into account. One authenticity reader pointed out I’d never specified the full extent of my hero’s hearing loss, an important detail readers needed in order to understand what he deals with on a daily basis. It added context to the story that I already knew but hadn’t communicated to my audience.