On writers and their worlds

My thought for the day is that people carry their own experiences around with them everywhere. It shows in the oddest places. The Aurealis reading, for instance, has more than one example of a writer who knows one country and is writing about another in terms that better fit his/her country of origin. If anyone wants to me explore the specific books that do this and talk about their approaches and how that prior knowledge changes the story, ask me after the finalists are announced, which is when I can talk about individual books.

In the meantime, though, this matches exactly what I've found with writers who use history in their work. Those who are writing solely using instinct or instinct aided by limited research aren't questioning what they 'know' about the world from their life experience. This means that, when there is a gap in knowledge it is filled with prior understanding. When there's a gap in understanding, it's filled using assumptions based on...a lot of stuff.

I know this is nothing new. It just stared at me rather starkly today and reminded me that a good writer is someone who questions widely and deeply. It's not how many books a writer reads that counts (although being widely read helps a lot, for it pushes one into that self-questioning) it's how much they actually understand of what's around them, so that they can understand how what they already know affects the world of their novel. And because it's staring me in the face and reminding me that I have (of course) unquestioned assumptions that feed into my fiction, I'm wondering if anyone knows books by someone who has studied this in relation to writers?

I suspect there's not much technical analysis of this out there, because we tend to discuss writers as individuals and this is a combination of a craft question and a culture question - and there aren't that many scholars who tackle that kind of thing. I know fjm does this in some of her work, and there are others, but I'm missing most of them. This means, of course, I'm missing a whole branch of literature. In which case - more to learn!

Can anyone advise?