Things You Didn’t Know You Should Know, Part 2: Going Out of Bounds

When I was about ten years old, I ran up to my mother in a department store and said, “Guess what! I found out what color the ink in those security tags is! It’s yellow!”

My mother, of course, was horrified, and I could practically see the visions of ruined (and very expensive) garments dancing in her eyes. She knew the tags I meant—the bulky plastic canisters clipped tightly to the priciest items in the store, ready to spill indelible ink all over the garments if a thief tried to remove them without the proper tool. My mother had seen me fingering the tags and knew I was naturally curious. I finally had to lead her over to the area near the register, where I’d been wandering around looking at things, to prove that I hadn’t actually done anything she’d have to pay for.

As it turned out, I had discovered a spot where I could stand and look behind the cash register as a salesclerk rang up purchases. Nobody watches a ten-year-old who’s standing still and not touching anything, so I was able to observe the clerk using a tool to remove the tags and drop them into a clear plastic tub under her counter. As it turned out, when the tags were opened correctly, they revealed little clear plastic windows that showed the color and level of ink inside—and all the windows I could see showed yellow ink. I thought this a strange color for security ink, especially on dark-colored garments; wouldn’t something like red be better? My mother was relieved, and for years afterward delighted in telling people about her clever troublemaking daughter who figured out the color of the security ink without actually getting into trouble.

Good writers, I’ve discovered, often have a knack for going carefully out of bounds. While great stories can come from the mundane details of ordinary life, there’s nothing like a dash of the unknown to spice things up. What’s behind that door? What’s in that locked cabinet? What would you see if you could just slip backstage while the curtain is down? If you want to know, chances are your readers will be interested, too, and real-life details from out-of-bounds places can make your story come alive. To that end, I’ve collected a few tips for aspiring discreet trespassers.

1. Look like you belong there. When I was in journalism school at USC, I attended a seminar by a well-regarded photojournalist, who eagerly described his favorite techniques for getting close to the scene of the action to take pictures. His most useful trick: he carried a set of colored windbreakers in the trunk of his car, and used them to blend into the crowd of officials at the scene—blue for the LAPD, brown or green for local sheriff’s departments, the Highway Patrol, the Forest Service, etc. (I treasure the memory of one of my professors standing behind the photographer, emphatically shaking his head and mouthing the word No! to students who appeared to be getting ideas.) While I don’t recommend impersonating a police officer just to get into someplace interesting, it does help to dress practically and look like you belong there. If you want to walk around a college campus, dress like a student or a professor. If you want to blend into an office, dress professionally.

2. Keep moving. One of life’s little joys for me in college was visiting a friend in her dormitory at Biola University. Biola’s a mid-sized Christian university, and its students include some of the nicest people I’ve ever met—and some of the dumbest. Every single time I visited the campus, if my friend didn’t meet me in the parking lot, I could easily sneak into her dormitory, despite my lack of a campus ID card or passkey. I would hang around outside the dorm and catch the door before it swung shut, or convince a resident that I’d lost my ID, and get inside in seconds. Once in there, all I had to do was keep walking like I knew where I was going, even if I didn’t. People don’t question you as much if you look like you’re in a hurry. Once I got all the way into my friend’s room while she was out (her roommate had left the door open) and hid her iPod just to make her crazy. (I don’t recommend doing this if you plan on getting into a place more than once.)

3. Mirror people. Human brains are keyed for pattern recognition. Remember that old Sesame Street song that went, “One of these things is not like the others”? We play that game all our lives. When you’re in an unfamiliar place, learning new things, try to mirror the people around you to keep from standing out. If the people around you walk a certain way, look at certain things, or stand with a certain posture, mimic that. Don’t copy one person continuously, and don’t mimic the most obvious tics, but try to take a little from everyone so that eyes will slide right over you, assuming you fit in. It works surprisingly well. When I was about eleven, I went to the reading of an uncle’s Ph.D dissertation—which happened to be about the psychology of child molesters. I mirrored the adults in the room well enough that I caught several of them doing a double-take when they belatedly realized that one member of the audience was young enough to be a victim of the crime being discussed.

4. Take a guide. There’s no substitute for an inside source of information. Thanks to a family friend, I once got an opportunity to interview a local fire captain who had invented a new system for finding victims trapped in collapsed buildings, as well as other search-and-rescue techniques. It was supposed to be a standard school assignment, and I was supposed to be interviewing him in his office at the station, but the man was so delighted to have someone interested in his work that he invited me to ride along on a fire truck while he and his men performed inspections of local industrial buildings. I learned priceless things about the amount of junk that gets thrown into the back of a fire engine’s cab, and about firefighters’ reluctance to wear seatbelts. It’s going in a story someday, and that fire captain is going in the acknowledgments. Never underestimate how excited people can get when you ask them to talk about their private obsessions—or their willingness to let you behind the scenes.

5. Don’t break or take. I happen to own a T-shirt that says (NINJA) in big white letters. For some reason, I often find myself wandering out of bounds while wearing it. It’s not that I got up that morning and decided to wear my ninja shirt and go trespassing; it’s just the ineffable workings of Murphy’s law that I seem to be wearing a ninja shirt when I do something vaguely sneaky. Often, I’ve found myself wearing the shirt when I went to tutor the children of a local family. The house has some nice security on it, but the family has a habit of leaving doors unlocked for one reason or another, and I’ll often just let myself in to save time and trouble when we have an appointment. The kids know that I might show up unexpectedly behind them at tutoring time without ringing the doorbell, and they are usually amused to see the ninja shirt … but their parents tolerate it only because they know I’d never actually steal anything or hurt anybody, and that I’ll break up a fight between the kids if I walk in on one. If you’re just looking to explore a corner of the world where you’re not strictly allowed, do your best to avoid damaging the place. It makes it a lot easier to pretend later that the trespassing was unintentional or that you belonged there all along.

6. Don’t be stupid. Don’t go slipping into places where you’d actually be in danger, and especially don’t tell the cops I told you to do it. Places where you really shouldn’t go without an official guide include crime scenes, disaster areas, nuclear reactors, military bases, etc. There’s a difference between casually wandering into a college dormitory where you don’t happen to live and slipping into Camp Pendleton when no one’s looking. (Pendleton is harder, for one thing.) Use your common sense; while there’s no real substitute for what you can learn by being in a place, there’s also no substitute for living to tell the tale. If wandering out of bounds would get you arrested, hurt, or killed, don’t do it. Find an informant to tell you about it, look at photos online, or do outside research. Heck, call up the public-information office, say you’re doing research, and ask to take a tour. You may not find out any nuclear secrets, but you’ll probably find out what the floor polish smells like—and sometimes that’s all you need to make your story come alive.

My favorite trespassing story dates from my senior year of high school, when I toured the campus of the University of California, Irvine with a friend. It was Saturday, when UCI doesn’t have any classes, and we’d finished the campus tour when my friend remarked that she wished she could sit in a UCI classroom and see if she felt comfortable there. This seemed like a pretty simple problem to me, so I convinced her to walk all over the campus with me, trying doorknobs until we found one carelessly unlocked. One of the buildings we accidentally explored before we found a lecture hall was home to a weekend neuroscience conference—lots of meeting rooms with signs on the door full of incomprehensible medical jargon. At one point, we passed a deserted sign-in table with a notice asking people to sign in and take a souvenir button from the conference. My friend talked me out of signing us in without an invitation, but I did get a button out of the deal, one that has informed my out-of-bounds trips ever since.

It says, “Brain Awareness Week—Just Use It!”

Things You Didn’t Know You Should Know, Part 1: Playing Doctor

Pretty much for the hell of it, I’m going to start a companion series to Comic Books You Should Be Reading. I’m going to list the various unlikely subjects good writers—at least, good writers of contemporary non-literary fiction (read: fiction where stuff happens)—should be able to fake their way through. Let’s face it—unless we luck into a Kathy Reichs-like situation where we can write bestselling novels about our very favorite subject, in which we happen to be one of the world’s leading experts, most of us will have to do some research from time to time in order to write authoritatively about lives not our own.

But the problem with research for writers is that we tend to assume we know enough about most things to fake our way through it. And let’s face it, we tend to know a lot—as avid readers, we are usually autodidacts, filling our brains with useful information long before we pick up a pen. If you’re not at least a little bit of a trivia buff, you probably shouldn’t be a writer. But that doesn’t help you when you say something stupid in print and suddenly get a hundred emails from people who experience the situation you describe all the time and can tell you just how wrong you got it.

So here’s the first subject writers should know at least a little bit about: emergency medicine.

Let’s be honest—unless you’re going to write stories where nobody gets hurt, ever, or all injuries and accidents correspond exactly to events that have befallen you or your nearest and dearest, at some point a character will run up against a medical complication that requires expert help. And because nobody plans this kind of thing happening, it’s more dramatic and more realistic to have that misadventure be an emergency. And nothing you've seen on TV can be trusted. Writing an adventure story? You need to know what to do if one of your characters gets shot, stabbed, concussed, etc.—even if your characters are going to handle the situation wrongly. You need a good sense of how physical damage will affect your story, and for that you need research.

I count myself lucky in this regard—two of my best friends are former EMTs, a third is a medical assistant, and a fourth is a veterinary technician. There’s nothing like being able to call somebody up at a random time and say, “So my character was just shot in the head. What are my options if I want him to survive?” (Of course, I don’t actually have to ask this one, because one EMT has already made me lose my lunch with a graphic story about taking a call on a failed suicide who shot himself in the temple, severed both optic nerves, and lived—blind, but functional.) There is no substitute for cultivating friendships with people in the trenches. Reward them handsomely for their help, thank them lavishly in your acknowledgments, and listen to everything they have to say when they’re answering your question. You never know when a detail will turn out to be crucial.

For example, I recently wrote a scene in which one of my characters gets cut and needs stitches, but can’t go to a hospital. Instead, he must talk another character through the process of stitching him up (the injury is to his back and he can’t reach it without help). The helper character, like me, has experience with sewing—but never with sewing anything that bleeds. My vet-tech friend came to my rescue, as the only person in my immediate circle who is allowed to stitch up patients. (According to one EMT, only qualified doctors can suture human beings—but the vet tech assures me that there isn’t a lot of practical difference between stitching up a human and stitching up, say, a pig.) She brought over a block of foam with some sample cuts, as well as two different kinds of curved needle and the type of thread used for sutures. She gave me a brief demonstration and then, content with her experience of my ordinary sewing abilities, sat back to watch me try.

The first thing I learned: I might be an artist with a straight needle, but I’m a klutz with a curved one. It doesn’t help much to push on the eye of the needle, and I could never really predict where the point would go once I pushed it into the “flesh.” I was quickly glad that my character would have a local anesthetic working when he got these stitches, and I had a new respect for Victor Frankenstein—those stitches were amazingly neat, while mine looked like a parade of drunken ants.

The second thing I learned: there’s no good place to grip a curved needle. It’s all going into the flesh at some point, of course, but the real problem is that once the point is in, so much of the curve is at a bad angle for my thick fingers that I had even less control over the needle’s direction than I expected, and I dropped the thing entirely several times. I quickly decided that my character would have to use the type of suture kit that comes with the suture permanently attached to a disposable needle, because otherwise the wound would never get stitched before the anesthetic wore off.

After several minutes of determined effort, I was ready to give up, and my foam “patient” was probably glad of it: 

A few tips for aspiring writers who are looking to build their own emergency-medicine knowledge but can’t do EMT training:

1. Make friends at your local fire station. When I was a journalism student, I was assigned the first-responders beat, and got to ride around in the fire truck and do all kinds of fun stuff. It wasn’t at all difficult to befriend the local firefighters once I explained who I was and why I was bothering them, especially since most fire stations are full of guys who basically do chores and paperwork all day while they’re waiting for that bell to ring. Asking respectful questions and carefully writing everything down (ask everyone to spell their name—it convinces them that you’re going to cite your sources) will take you pretty far, and be clear at the outset that if a call comes in, you will immediately get out of the way. Finally, simple comfort food is your friend here. Firefighters often have 24-hour shifts (minimum!), and a lot of their meals are either takeout or whatever the guy on mess duty can cook. My best interviews came after I showed up with a plate of homemade chocolate-chip cookies. Best of all, firefighters are much easier to befriend than police officers, who tend to be more wary of the press, and if you do need to talk to some cops, you can do worse than come in with a glowing reference from a fire captain.

2. Read reference books. Even if they’re boring, even if you don’t understand it all, something will sink in, and it will help you when you’re talking to the experts. Nothing makes a highly knowledgeable person like you better than a question like, “Okay, I understand that tetanus sets in when a wound is exposed to certain kinds of contaminants and stuff, but exactly where do you find those contaminants? Where’s the most unlikely source of tetanus you’ve found?” The preface says that you’ve done some homework and your source is not wasting his or her time; the follow-up question reassures your source that his or her expertise is indeed needed.

3. Seek out experts online. Dr. D.P. Lyle, M.D., has written some great books on how forensics work for mystery writers, and he has a very helpful website where he takes questions. Universities are another great source of experts; some, like California State University, Fullerton, have searchable “experts guides” that let you find faculty members who specialize in your area of inquiry. They’re a great resource as long as you are flexible about when they get back to you on your questions. I once interviewed a leading expert on urban planning and didn’t realize what a big deal he was until years later, when I noticed him being cited in a lot of other reference material I read.

Finally, and this is the most important lesson I’ve learned about research for writers—never be afraid to ask a (polite) question. In general, being clueless will take you pretty far, as long as you’re nice about it. And the questions you don’t ask will be the holes in your story …