Writing what you know and omnipresent choughs

I’ve been sorting through the zillions of unfinished stories in my files, and found half a dozen that I’m going to concentrate on for the next few weeks. They’re ones I feel have legs, stories that I want to communicate. They range from 100 words to 3,000 words but they all have one thing in common: they’re reflecting a facet of myself. Heavily disguised, but I’m in there. That’s okay: ‘writing what you know’ is oft-repeated advice, for excellent reasons. 

However, what if writing what you know intrudes a little too much into the setting and colour of your story? I work in the countryside, in nature conservation. Not all my stories are set in this world, but landscape and wildlife and the outdoor world feature strongly in my writing. If there isn’t a character who’s just been chopping wood, there’ll be someone off to survey a quadrat in a chalk meadow when the Inciting Incident happens. If wellies don’t make an appearance, a landrover will, probably with a terrier in the passenger seat.  And at some stage, someone will observe a pair of choughs. The character might see the pair and remark on it out loud; they might hear their call and search the sky; they might see the birds while sitting alone on a rock mulling over a key plot point. But you can depend on it, there will be choughs. They are in Every Single One of the six stories I picked to work on. 

(Here’s a link to the RSPB’s chough page. Irish and British choughs have lovely blood-red bills to match their legs, but the only royalty-free images I could find were of alpine choughs, whose bills are yellow. I’ve never managed to catch one on camera myself; too busy looking up with a grin and saying ‘Look, choughs!’ to my companion or random strangers.)

I’m not going to write them out of the stories I’m working on. They’re beautiful birds. So are the others that sneak in (if it’s a Scottish story, it’s almost a cert that someone will rhapsodize over black guillemots). But I am taking it as an opportunity to set myself a challenge. As I finish each piece and start working on another, I shall use other experiences from my life for background colour, or draw on the worlds that my friends and family inhabit - the more uncomfortable and distant from my current life, the better. I spent four years in my twenties working in a hospital as an audiologist, in a soundproof room with no windows. Horrid, horrid, horrid. It’s unbelievable to me now, and I shudder to think of it; it was a horrible time. Yet there’s a huge bank of story material there just waiting to be plundered. Likewise my sisters’ experiences: between us we’ve got everything from bending the croissants in a French bakery to working in a sexual health clinic.

There's an enormous number of worlds out there, and that's before going into fantasy or science fiction. It’s time to explore a bit more.