When I was working on my first novel, I knew almost nothing about ostrich farming. By the time I finished, I knew a lot, and then I had to figure out how much of that to actually put on the page.
That tension, between what you know and what your reader needs to know, sits at the heart of writing about a niche subject. Whether you’re working with curling, paleontology, sailing, beekeeping, or an imagined world of your own making, you’ll eventually run into the same question: how much should I explain?
There isn’t one clean answer. But there are some things to consider.
Borrow A Fish Out Of Water
The most reliable tool when writing about a niche subject is the outsider character.
If you can, bring in a character who genuinely doesn’t know the world (a journalist, a new hire, a love interest, a younger sibling) and let the people who do know it explain things to them. The explanation feels natural because someone in the story actually needs to hear it.
You’ll see this a lot once you start looking for it, in books and in movies. The outsider character lets you put information into dialogue and reaction, where it tends to feel earned, instead of into narration, where it can feel like an info dump.
Let Setting And Action Carry The Weight
The other reliable move is to bake explanation into the action itself.
Carry Soto is Back is a great example. The book is all about tennis, a sport I know nothing about, but as the characters respond in scenes, I didn’t feel like I was scrambling to figure things out. I could tell what mattered by the way the story turned.
If your characters can do, demonstrate, or react to the world rather than describe it, you’re usually in better shape. You can also lean on a supporting character whose role naturally requires explanation: a sports commentator, a museum docent, a teacher. Their work inside the story gives you a built-in reason to make the unfamiliar accessible.
Steal From Genres That Already Solved This
Sports romance is a goldmine here. Hockey, NASCAR, baseball: these books are written for readers who often don’t know the sport. They explain enough to make the stakes feel real, but not so much that they slow down what the reader actually came for. The same goes for technical thrillers and historical fiction set in unfamiliar professions.
Go to the library and pull two or three books that live in a world readers wouldn’t naturally know, and watch what they do. Where do they explain? Where do they trust the reader to fill in? This isn’t about copying. It’s about studying how writers you respect have handled the same problem.
When Writing About A Niche Subject, Trust Your Reader
Most writers err on the side of explaining too much, but readers are smarter than we give them credit for. If they don’t immediately know what a hog line is, they’ll figure it out from context, the way they figure out unfamiliar words in any book. You don’t need to define every term the first time it appears.
The F1 film is a fun example. I know nothing about Formula One racing (are you catching a theme here around me and sports?). But the announcers’ voices came in at exactly the right moments to tell me what was at stake. The explanations arrive at the moments of highest stakes, not in a wall of opening exposition. That’s the model.
Writing about a niche subject is harder than writing about something everyone recognizes, but it’s also where some of the most memorable novels live. Beekeeping. Lighthouse-keeping. Quantum physics. The specificity is what makes them stick.
Your job isn’t to teach the reader the whole profession. Your job is to drop them into a world they didn’t know they wanted to visit, and make them feel at home there so that they don’t want to leave.
Let’s Talk It Through
Finding the right balance between too much explanation and not enough is one of the most common places writers get stuck, and it’s exactly the kind of thing we can work through together. I’m hosting a free webinar on August 18, 20, and 23 (same session, three dates, pick the one that works for you). It’s called How to Turn Your Half-Finished Novel Into A Completed Manuscript.
Come with your niche world, your half-explained curling rink, your beekeeping subplot, your imagined universe, and let’s talk about what your story actually needs. Save your spot here.
This is why I cannot understand the hype over Where the Crawdads Sing. Written by a nonfiction author, it irritated me no end that she kept bringing in various points of view to explain things. And then the ending, which was so improbable and had no explanation at all. It felt like the author didn’t trust the reader to be able to figure things out on their own.
(Sorry about the errors in the last post. I noticed them after I posted.) Many times there needs to be a balance. I don’t assume people know everything about flying a plane, but being (among other things) a pilot, I don’t put as much detail as I can in flight scenes. I do put in enough to explain to those who don’t fly some of the process.
I have also explained the method of research for dark matter, and what steganography is. I do as much as I can through character interaction.
It is not a matter of trust, but a realization that others don’t know about these things, just as I don’t know about other things.
Somewhere, a balance needs to be found that fits the story and the reader.
Thanks for sharing this, Doug. This is a great example of why careful research matters. When a story gets a factual detail wrong, especially about something readers know well, it can pull them right out of the story. Those details may seem small, but they play a big role in making a story feel believable.
That book seems to land very differently depending on the reader. What you’re describing is a real craft question, though: when a story rotates through points of view to deliver information, some readers feel guided and others feel handled. Same technique, very different experience.
That’s part of what makes this so hard to teach. There’s no setting that works for everyone.
Thanks for reading.
I agree with the method of introducing information into a story, but I find in reading many well known authors that their research does not go far enough for them to know what they are talking about.
Examples:
–The protagonist has a new Corvette and a guy seeking revenge beats it up with a sledge hammer and it is all bent up when the protag returns. Corvettes are made of fiberglass and carbon fibre. You can break them, but you can’t dent them.
–A novel about flying in WWII a pilot make a sharp turn with the rudder on the plane. The rudder stears a boat, but does not stear an airplane.
The authors should have done better research, or the editors should have caught these things.