I Know What I Know (and that’s all I know)

Aside Posted on January 14, 2014 Updated on January 14, 2014

“Write What You Know”

I’ve heard this advice a lot over the past few weeks.  To me, it’s a strange idea for a guideline, and something that I’ve struggled with over the years.  When I first began to share my writing with the world many years ago on a site called Geocities (unfortunately now lost in the tides of ancient internet), I realized even then that I didn’t have enough world experience to write what could be considered a plausible story.

I was young, in middle school, when I started roleplaying online in various forums on our crappy dial-up internet.  It would drive my parents crazy, the amount of bandwidth I hogged up by checking the forums again and again, just waiting for the next reply, waiting for my chance to contribute to the story.  But there was something undeniably addictive about creating a story with another person halfway around the world.  I didn’t care for their personal lives, it didn’t even matter to me what their real names were, what I focused on were the stories we were telling.  It felt to me like a license to play pretend, a game which I was steadily outgrowing as I inched toward puberty and the societal pressures put on me by my fellow middle schoolers grew harsher.  At the end of the day, I could leave behind the teasing and the anxiety of never quite fitting in, and I could take part in the production of a whole new world; it was a fictional world where I could take out all of my frustrations and angst on characters who hardly deserved it (but sometimes did — I’m looking at you, Mary Sue).

But there was a problem with this newfound hobby, and it had nothing to do with the fact that I was being grounded every other week for tying up the phone line and preventing Grandma from calling us.  The problem was that I had fallen down the rabbit hole.  I no longer enjoyed spending time with my peers.  I would actively avoid being picked up to hang out with my friends; I had a list of excuses ready every time the phone rang, and I certainly couldn’t bear to spend any of my precious time on a relationship.

Online roleplaying had become my addiction.

For years, I was ashamed of how much time and effort went into this hobby of mine, but I always had a justification for anyone who asked:  I was practicing for my career as a writer.  All of this time, all of these strained relationships would someday be worth it when I was a successful writer.  The endless hours I had spent in front of a computer screen would have meant, not a stunt in my emotional and social growth, but a different kind of growth in character.

Looking back, I can say that my justification was neither right nor wrong entirely.  Because that time spent developing characters, planning plot-lines, and learning to collaborate with another person has helped give me a boost that most people in their writing career are either blessed with innately, or spend time and money learning from an educational institution.  My passion for character development comes from my early days of playing pretend, and it was incensed by the years I spent roleplaying online.

But, what I’ve come to find out over the past couple of years, is that spending so much time cooped up in my room focused on only one story, I missed out on a lot of life experiences.  It wasn’t until I gave up online roleplaying, and focused my attention on what life was giving me (not what I was giving to my characters), that I fully realized what was missing.

Counting from the day I was last involved in an online roleplay (a span of about three and a half years), this is what I’ve accomplished:

• Worked several temporary and part-time jobs
• Moved out of my parents’ house
• Moved in with my best friend and her fiance-at-the-time-now-husband
• Got hired at a steady, full-time job with benefits
• Met the love of my life
• Married the love of my life
• Lost close friendships
• Gained new friendships
• Hated my job
• Loved my job
• Hated a car so much I wanted to blow it up
• Bought a new car
• Stayed behind as my best friends moved to a state several hours away
• Shared in the all-consuming joy of those friends becoming pregnant
• Re-kindled my relationship with my parents
• Broke down emotionally, and realized my life’s passion with the help of my husband

What I knew before all of that was very little, and it showed in the way that I wrote.  I remember what it was like trying to write sex scenes before I’d ever actually had sex (and boy, how romanticized those scenes were!), and how conversations between characters were always stilted; they felt one-sided.  I would spend upwards of eight hours a day roleplaying and writing, and as a result, the plotlines and the characters that we wrote had a depth I’ve only seen in the better media that exists today.   But the experiences that I had were always behind a computer screen, and they were fictional.  I had no idea how people actually interacted in the real world.

Taking the time off away from roleplaying and away from writing completely has given me a chance to enter the world I had avoided for so long.  I was forced to learn how to interact with people and actually pay attention to what they were saying.  Before, as rude as it sounds, I was usually thinking of my next plot, or my new character I wanted to introduce while I was out socializing.  I never really engaged 100%.

When someone advises, “Write what you know,” I always do a quick mental inventory.  What do I know?  I know a lot of things.  And I certainly know more things at this moment than I did four years ago.  I’ll know more tomorrow than I knew today.  How can we possibly keep up with our mind’s ability to catalog the information that’s constantly streaming in, day in and day out?  Not a day goes by that I don’t think of an idea that’s quickly swallowed up by my work, or a conversation I’m having, or more thoughts, better thoughts.

But why should we confine ourselves to writing only what we know?  Even if our understanding of the world is compacted, we each have a unique perspective that’s worth sharing.  Our experiences, whether they take place in a tangible plane, or reside primarily in the hypothetical, are valid and worthy of our attention.  As we go down the road of life, our perspective on our surroundings changes.  There is value in throwing yourself out into the world and experiencing all that you can, but there is also value in intense focus and introspection.  “What you know” is always changing.  What you think you know, or what you imagine could be, now that’s more interesting.