Write What You Know
Or at least what you can find online at 2 a.m.
Even though Radio Starr is set in the ‘80s, an era I lived through, I still fact-checked everything like a student fearing the red pen.
Some authors spend years researching their novels. Their protagonists might be doctors in India, female soldiers in Korea, or—my personal favorite—a Cro-Magnon cave woman raised by Neanderthals (yay, Ayla from Clan of the Cave Bear). Mystery writers dive into murder methods and forensic science, which probably makes for some interesting browser histories!
I recently read Groupies by Sarah Priscus. She’s young, just out of college, but her novel is set in the late 1970s. She nailed the tone of the era so well I kept wondering: Did she time-travel? Did her grandmother tell her stories after a couple glasses of chardonnay?
Meanwhile, our local poet laureate, Lisa Vihos, wrote about a 16th-century female portrait painter. The seed for her 2022 novel The Lone Snake sprouted in the ‘90s while she studied art and poetry, and she even traveled to Italy to get the details right.
Compared to all that, world-building for a novel about a DJ named Eva in the 1980s was a breeze. I didn’t have to interview “vintage” radio announcers—I was one. Still, I spent an embarrassing number of hours fact-checking the little things: making sure the songs Eva announces existed at the time, confirming whether certain news events had happened yet, researching earthquakes and even Hiney Wine for a morning show gag. Write what you know… but also double- and triple-check it.
To jog my own memory, I watched old movies—Absence of Malice with Sally Field and Paul Newman, for instance. It reminded me that in 1981, fashion was surprisingly… sweet. Lots of bows, buttoned-up blouses, and for men, pastel sweater vests. If I’d relied on memory alone, Eva’s wardrobe would have been all neon spandex, spiked hair, and head-to-toe Prince. Also: how many people today know cars used to have a high-beam button on the floor? Eva does when she’s driving home from the radio station on a foggy night.
Even though the novel’s framework resembles my radio career, Eva faces situations universal to radio announcers everywhere. Fielding calls from intoxicated night owls? Check. Getting fired and having dead-air nightmares? Occupational hazards. Being the only woman on staff? Check. Managing a new announcer during a tornado warning? (That’s in the sequel, RADIO STORM.) Check. Skipping records, unexpected chaos, and the joy of playing a song that brightens someone’s whole day? Check, check, check.
So yes—write what you know. And when you don’t know? Well, that’s what old movies, imagination, and search engines are for.
That's too funny!!! To this day, I edit out 'uhs' (and long breaths), never thought of stringing them together, lol
Just finished a podcast with a young author (she's the host) and she brought up the problem of "uh's." I told her the story of how I had a young DJ with a horrible "uh and ahh" problem at a student radio station I managed, cured when we spliced together 90 seconds of his "uhs and ahhs" and put it on a cart.
And then I had to explain what a cart was, and that we spliced it not digitally but actually cut the tape on a splicing block and taped it back together!
And then I had to explain a splicing block and splicing tape.