Becoming an Expert

Advice for writers is plentiful. It is not always easy to follow. How often have you read: Write about what you know best? Are you doing it? Am I doing it? Meanwhile I do, but at the beginning it was hard. Many feel that what they know best everybody else knows as well. That assumption is wrong. You should rid yourself of the idea just as soon as possible.

You may feel that everybody knows what you know; we are not a hive and don't share memories. This thinking is a double trap for writers. On one hand, it keeps you from writing relevant and interesting content. Many will be interested in what you have to say about something seemingly obvious; that is from your point of view. On the other hand, you might write about something assuming that your reader has the basic facts. Nothing can be further from the truth. You might have written a valuable contribution for a knowledge base; it might be incomprehensible to readers looking at it for the first time.

Writing about what you know best means that you are establishing yourself as an expert in that field. If you live in a small town in Europe, this is exotic to the inhabitant of Chennai; and the same goes the other way, too. It is part of your branding process to establish your name as that of a notable expert and author. When establishing your expertise, don't disdain the obvious, embrace it. What might seem natural to you might seem alien to someone else.

If you write from an American point of view, your basic assumptions might seem exceedingly strange to someone living in Asia. If you give advice on knitting, it might work for the way you learned it by holding the needles in both hands and moving them alternatively. Holding one needle in one hand and moving it around the other one clamped under your arm might make it impossible to follow your advice. The reader needs to know what you are doing from the start, where you are coming from. Basics are not a waste of time, they are a part of what you have to do to establish yourself as an expert.

Have you followed me so far? You noticed that being an expert is entirely up to you. Nobody appoints you to be the expert on how to feed a water buffalo; it is you who appoints yourself. Once you have done that, all you need is a bit of conviction in real life and you can be called in by the local TV station in their next documentary about water buffaloes. All the experts you see on TV anywhere in the world started off exactly where you are starting off from now. In a way, you are watching me establishing myself as the expert on experts right now.

Further reading
The Well-Fed Writer
The Expert in Weird History
Getting Ideas for Writing