No, said Aziraphale, it's ineffable.

I have … a tip.

If you’re writing something that involves an aspect of life that you have not experienced, you obviously have to do research on it. You have to find other examples of it in order to accurately incorporate it into your story realistically.

But don’t just look at professional write ups. Don’t stop at wikepedia or webMD. Look up first person accounts.

I wrote a fic once where a character has frequent seizures. Naturally, I was all over the wikipedia page for seizures, the related pages, other medical websites, etc.

But I also looked at Yahoo asks where people where asking more obscure questions, sometimes asked by people who were experiencing seizures, sometimes answered by people who have had seizures.

I looked to YouTube. Found a few individual videos of people detailing how their seizures usually played out. So found a few channels that were mostly dedicated to displaying the daily habits of someone who was epileptic.

I looked at blogs and articles written by people who have had seizures regularly for as long as they can remember. But I also read the frantic posts from people who were newly diagnosed or had only had one and were worried about another.

When I wrote that fic, I got a comment from someone saying that I had touched upon aspects of movement disorders that they had never seen portrayed in media and that they had found representation in my art that they just never had before. And I think it’s because of the details. The little things.

The wiki page for seizures tells you the technicalities of it all, the terminology. It tells you what can cause them and what the symptoms are. It tells you how to deal with them, how to prevent them.

But it doesn’t tell you how some people with seizures are wary of holding sharp objects or hot liquids. It doesn’t tell you how epileptics feel when they’ve just found out that they’re prone to fits. It doesn’t tell you how their friends and family react to the news.

This applies to any and all writing. And any and all subjects. Disabilities. Sexualities. Ethnicities. Cultures. Professions. Hobbies. Traumas. If you haven’t experienced something first hand, talk to people that have. Listen to people that have. Don’t stop at the scholarly sources. They don’t always have all that you need.

“He fell down on his birthday. We’d just celebrated with a party. He was standing on a ladder, trying to fix a shelf, and he fell. It was all very sudden. He was in a coma for a week and then he was gone. After his death, I began to write in a journal. On the first pages I wrote about his final days. I was so sad. I just needed to process what happened. But then I kept going back, back, writing everything I could remember: the walks we had together, the places we visited, museums, castles, holidays with the children. I carried a pen with me at all times. Every time I had a memory, I’d write it down. We’d known each other since we were fourteen years old. We’d take walks in this park back then, with our parents permission, of course. It’s been almost nine months since his death. I’m feeling a little better. I’m still writing, but it’s not so much about memories anymore. It’s more spiritual now. I think he’s still evolving somewhere. One night I saw him in a dream. It was the young Claude. Twenty-five or thirty years old. It was so real. I don’t even think it was a dream. I could feel him there. He was standing in a doorway, dressed completely in red. And Claude never wore red. But when I reached out to hug him, the door closed, and he disappeared. I believe he’s still out there somewhere. And that I’ll see him again on the other side of that door.”
(Paris, France)

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.