Write what you know, learn what you don't know: Weird things I've researched in the name of writing

"Write what you know."

That's the advice a lot of beginning writers hear. But if we just wrote what we knew, our characters would too often have our hobbies, live in our hometowns, and never do things we haven't experienced. Writing what you know limits fantasy, horror, science fiction, even historical fiction if we're not historians. It restricts most of us us from writing about doctors, lawyers, mental illnesses, horses, Peru, farmers, being rich, living in poverty... you get the idea.

(But at least it lets you write a choking-on-swamp-water scene based on the time you almost drowned on Dr Pepper at Qdoba because someone told a fart story.)

So my modification of this advice is:

"Write what you know. If you don't know it, learn it."

And to learn, we research. Sometimes we have to research very specific topics or questions that don't always get us answers. Sometimes we spend an hour looking up  names for grey, because we've already used ash and hematite, and the characters have never seen steel or concrete to compare a color to. And sometimes, we make weird searches and hope no one sees in our browser history that we Googled "man shave face how often."

So in the name of getting details right in my fiction, here are some searches I've made while writing Beyond the Mountain, of varying levels of weirdness. Not all of them even made it into the later drafts of the book.

1. stabbed knife through hand
2. banana beer
3. reproduction rate of cows
4. cape otter femur size
   
5. "sam hill" synonyms
6. do fish stink when you catch them
7. foods that start with sh
8. stitches and scabs
   
9. rammed earth speed by hand
10. carved wooden spoons ergonomic