The other day I was discussing something I had written on pacemakers and defibrillators with a woman. She was the sort of woman who could represent “the general public.” She wanted to know if I was a doctor. Disappointed when I said no, she asked if I might be, sigh, a nurse. Not even. Then she asked if I perhaps had a defibrillator implanted in me. Negative again.
At this point, she seemed altogether flustered. She told me that she always wanted to see a person’s credentials and, as far as she could tell, I didn’t have any. She almost demanded to know why I had written something about pacemakers and defibrillators for the general public.
The fact is that many experts have written about this topic, but they’ve written books that would have a soporific rather than stimulating effect on the average reader. That’s because experts write to other experts. No physician-expert to my knowledge has ever written about pacemakers for the general public; I wouldn’t hold my breath, either. These guys don’t write. Writers write.
I love that about writing. Writers move around through society without benefit of official credentials or training courses or licenses or certificates of accomplishment. We’re perennial outsiders. We’re the ones who get to know a subject but in a way that’s quite different from the usual people involved in that subject.
The fact is that I am very well qualified to write about defibrillators and pacemakers. I know the subject quite well. I have worked in that industry off and on for nearly 20 years.
But even if I had not had that under my belt, writers are “qualified” to write insofar as they are able and honest researchers and students. I can remember being in an investment class where the instructor sputtered that he found out somebody who wrote an article in Money magazine about stock market strategies was not a serious full-time trader.
I was very surprised. I would never assume that anybody writing an article for Money magazine is a full-time trader because full-time stock traders don’t write articles. Writers write articles. They write articles about what they learned from interviewing or observing or studying full-time savvy stock traders.
The general public is not knowledgeable about how writing works.
The reason I bring this up is that writers, sometimes very new writers, get hung up on this point. Maybe they’ve been listening too intently to their families and friends who can’t understand how writing works. Good writers sometimes get intimidated. There may be people in your life telling you that you don’t “know enough” to write about this or that.
They don’t understand how writing works.
I’ve written about Mexican cooking (I’m not Mexican and not a chef and certainly not a Mexican chef), collecting vinyl records and record-players (don’t do either), pacemakers and defibrillators (not a medical person and don’t have a pacemaker), and debt consolidation (I’m not a credit counselor). If somebody asked me to write about parasailing in Ecuador or new research in mutiple sclerosis or starting a daycare center, I’d be able to tackle those topics, too.
Experts rarely write. Even when they do write, nobody can understand them because experts, at best, write to other experts. It’s left to the writers to learn from the experts and “translate” their expertise to a broader audience.
Don’t let anybody tell you differently. Writing is its own sort of expertise.
