How to write about what you don't know?

Question

I am a strong believer in writing what you know. Everything I write is at least partially based on something that I have experienced.

My problem is that for plot reasons, I need one of my characters to grow up in a culture and environment I am not familiar with. I need at least a chapter in that area. My goal is to portray the culture and belief of that region as a native.

I thought about reading books located in that area and maybe speaking with natives. However, it is in a region that is not portrayed in movies and seldom in books. Yet enough of my potential readers are familiar enough with the area to spot made-up things.

Are there any methods to facilitate simulating an empirical knowledge of a relatively unknown area?

N.B. this is not a duplicate of Writing about a subject on which you have no expertise?, which is about technical writing.

I found a partial answer in How to do research to write characters from a different culture?

Answer 1

The bit "Yet enough of my potential readers are familiar enough with the area to spot made-up things. " leads to the conclusion that you should not do this.

Unless you want to invest the necessary time researching and reading about this community, then, it seems a recipe for disaster.

If you don't have any experience about something, you will always get interested about different aspect of it, or present it in a different light. That shows up, and not in a positive way.

Answer 2

I am writing a story set in the US during the 1920's.

Even though this is in the US, I'm only 60 years old so this is a different culture from me. I have been doing a lot of research as I've been writing. From the hotels for rich people and what floors they would have been on, to what a gun might be called, to what cars would be on the road, to what might the laws be like, to what sort of musical entertainment might have been available in a speakeasy.

Google has been my friend! This is what introduced me to the Stack Exchange community.

If you can't be there in person, then do the next best thing: research. In a few weeks I'll be watching some movies set during the 20's and 30's to make sure I've got the slang right.

At least the characters speak English!

Answer 3

In my experience as a reader, most writers who have done this successfully seem to have spent a lot of time interviewing a range of people native to the area. I don't think there's any great shortcut around this. If you don't want to, or are not in a position to do that kind of research, you might want to replace the real location with a fictional one. Of course, that will just replace the effort put in on real research with worldbuilding.

A good example of a novel successfully written from interviews (although I'm not personally in a position to judge the accuracy of the result) is Pearl S. Buck's classic The Good Earth. The book presents as extremely authentic, probably because it's a composite story built from the real life experiences of innumerable villagers whom Buck personally interviewed.

I can sympathize with this question, because I dislike research, and avoid it when I can. But I've come to accept what a decisive difference it makes to the final result.