On not being an expert

writing in "the beginner's bubble"

I recently had a phone interview with the marketing director of a conservation organization who is seeking a writer to produce monthly articles on a specific topic—and it’s a topic on which I would not call myself an expert. I’m still super interested in the work, but would they want to hire someone who isn’t fluent in the conversations already happening around this issue?

To my relief, she said she thinks “non-experts” are generally better at telling the human-interest angles in a way that other non-experts can relate to. “And besides,” she said, “you’ll learn along the way.

It was really good to hear that—and fingers crossed I’ll be writing for them soon.

The interview reminded me of a Freakonomics episode about the “beginner’s bubble,” which describes a tendency to overestimate our competence when we’re just starting to learn a new skill or topic. This unearned confidence is inspired by a sudden acquisition of new knowledge, before we’ve grasped the scope of how much we still don’t know.

In psychology, this is known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect, a cognitive bias in which people often think they are more capable or knowledgeable than they really are, due to a lack of the information they would need to recognize otherwise.

Basically we learn a little bit and we get excited and that excitement blinds us to how we’re still mostly clueless. Also, we just can’t know what we don’t know.

The conversation about the “beginner’s bubble” on Freakonomics was mostly a warning: Be aware of those who think they know but actually do not, and also look out for that misguided confidence in yourself.

For writers, perhaps curiosity wins over mastery.

But it struck me that as writers, we often work in that beginner’s bubble—which for our purposes, I think, can be a good thing. Sure, you might be an expert on one topic or even several. But more likely, you’re covering stories that are new to you and relying on a sudden and seemingly thorough acquisition of new knowledge through research and interviews. (It’s called journalism!) If we only wrote about what we already know through and through, we’d never discover anything new, for ourselves or for our readers.

As writers, we are often learning as we write. This is not the case for most other professions. Surgeons are experts before they cut you open. Plumbers are experts before they bust through a wall to work on your pipes. Writers are experts in learning and communicating what we learn—but we generally figure out the rest as we go. That process of discovery is applied to things we sometimes know very little about.

Our breakthroughs might happen before we even know what we’re breaking—what we’re creating or even what we’re thinking.

“I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means,” wrote Joan Didion. And I bet you do, too.

Venturing into the unknown is our job. We shuffle out on the thin ice of our basic knowledge, in search of sources, facts, and some kind of narrative arc. We don’t know exactly what we’ll find there until we place one foot on the ice, and then the other—and some unearned confidence is absolutely necessary or we would just sit there on the dry bank, terrified of falling into freezing water.

(Wouldn’t the act of crashing through the ice make for an excellent climax though?)

We should all be aware of the potential pitfalls of the beginner’s bubble. It’s why we have editors and fact checkers and why we rely so heavily on actual experts in our reporting. It’s why we should be diligent in our research and open to criticism and corrections. But the beginner’s bubble is also where “beginner’s luck” lies. What we don’t know allows us to relax into the confidence of what little we do know, and continue participating and writing.

When I interviewed farmers for this piece about the water crisis in Southern Oregon, I knew very little about water rights or draught or agriculture. But I interviewed three people and I read *a lot* (in a very relative sense) and then felt capable of covering the story. I had enough information to arrange the experiences they shared with me, cross-referenced with what I could learn through research. But I also had to keep in mind how much I didn’t know. I had to leave room in the piece for all the people I didn’t talk to and the vastness and complexity of a story that couldn’t possibly be told in its entirety with 2,000 words. (I wrote more on that—and the comfort we find in facts, in this issue.)

Had I been an expert in water rights or draught or agriculture going into that reporting process, I may not have written the same story, homing in on the experiences of those farmers who are desperately trying to keep their businesses alive.

The beginner’s bubble is something to be aware of. But it also gives us an opportunity to expand into new territory. That bubble gives us space for the confidence we need to tell important stories without spending a decade on learning everything there is to know, before realizing that’s actually impossible and then failing to write anything at all.

We get to learn as we write, discover as we write, develop expertise as we write, and help others do the same. Which is a lot of fun, but it’s also a lot of responsibility.

So that’s my bit of advice for today: Dance in the beginner bubble, friends. Write what you don’t know, and get to know more and more. Just don’t forget to recognize all that exists outside your bubble, even as it expands.

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Stay inspired,

Britany