You know I love travelling, but one continent I suspect I may never get to is Antarctica. It fascinates me, of course, but those cold temperatures are not as high on my list as many other places, and since I just finished a great novel set in Antarctica, I am doing a fairly good job of imagining it for myself anyway. That’s thanks to Robyn Mundy who wrote The Nature of Ice, and reminded me of another great novel about a modern Antarctic experience from one of all-time favourite writers, Nikki Gemmell, who wrote Shiver.

If you’re even just the slightest bit curious about what a stint in Antarctica would be like, I’d highly recommend these two novels – one told from the point of view of a photographer, and the other from a journalist, so they’re not your typical science-based Antarctic non-fiction. In fact, both books are beautifully written, particularly from the point of view of explaining both the landscape and the reality of everyday life in a continent that most of us know little about.

“Writing what you know”, Antarctic style

No doubt you’ve heard that writing teacher’s adage, “write what you know”, and although I would edit that to be “write what you know, or can reasonably accurately find out about”, I do concede that I will not be writing any stories set in Antarctica in the near future. What I’m trying to say is that these Antarctic novels really brought home to me how effective it is to write about your own experiences – both Mundy and Gemmell have had their own experiences in the deep, deep south – and especially so when your experiences are somewhat unique.

I guess that’s where a lot of my ideas for novels come from, too. While I haven’t had the amazing chance to hang out in Antarctica, I have been able to live and work in countries as diverse as Japan, Slovakia and Germany (not to mention my homeland of Oz), meeting lots of different local people and learning heaps about the cultures. The reviews for the draft of my first novel, Kanako’s Foreigner, often mentioned an appreciation of the details of Japanese culture, so I guess I was doing something right.

Some of the ideas I have for future novels – I could give up the day job now and write full time for a hundred years just to get them all written – are starting to verge away from what I know towards the “what I could find out about”. It’ll be interesting for me in the future to figure out how much I can do that, and how well I can pull it off. I know it annoys me if I’m reading a novel and there’s an obvious error of fact, or at least it’s obvious to me because I have some special experience. Something to ponder.

Over to you: What’s your take on “write what you know”? What do writers do who don’t have such a breadth of experience to draw on? Let me know what you think in the comments.