It’s a common adage that you should “Write what you know.”  There’s certainly truth in that.  It’s often easiest to write what you know about, plus it’s reasonable to say that something you know is something you’re interested in, and being interested in what you’re writing certainly helps the words fly onto the page.  I have spent a long time crafting Illithiusts and my characters and it is something which makes it very easy to write them.  I can easily drop our Fey and Bard into a situation and just record their reactions, easy words requiring minimal planning (at least to that specific piece of writing).  It’s how most of the drop stories get written.

However, I have certainly found over my years “Writing to understand,” to hold its own value.  One of the reasons I think we look to fiction is as a means to better understand our world, to better grasp our own situations and find some form of insight.  The way a piece of fiction can strike me differently at different times in my life is one of the most amazing things I find about it, and why I enjoy rereading certain works every handful or two of years.  However, sometimes I’m looking to work through and see someone else experience a specific issue in an attempt to better understand that issue myself.  I’m writing to understand.

Writing what I seek to understand provides me one way to dig into an issue.  It’s funny for me to look back on how I’ve used this in the past.  The simplest case has to do with bad knees.  I’ve had two serious knee injuries in my life, injuries that impact me to this day and during the course of them left me wondering to just what extent my mobility would recover and how much it would be hampered.  There was a time where Quartes struggled with bad knees, knees that would pop are struggle to carry his body as he knew they could’ve in the past.  Knees that would fail him an inopportune moment.  It forced the old Fey to face a reduction in his abilities, to see himself differently.  It helped me understand how my injuries could affect me, how the flexibility of the human body gave me opportunities to adjust and minimize the impact (especially since I’m not having to fight dragons as I strive to advert a cataclysmic event).

I ended up recovering better than expected from my injuries, though I did things like adjust my running stride along the way that meant that my best miles times are in the past but I would impact my knees less.  Quartes moved on with nothing more than an occasional pop coming from his knees.  Adding some extra depth to his character and helping me know him better.  Sometimes it’s just easiest to see a situation play out with someone who isn’t us to help us see it with some perspective.

Ultimately, “Writing to understand,” leads to better knowing and helps with “Writing what you know.”  More so, I think it can give us space to better see something.

This week you’ll all get to know something new.  We start a short story called End of the War and introduce the Soldier, Airka of the Province of Verken.  With this story I strove not just to know Airka better, but to better know Illithiust and the legend of Quartes through someone who had never met the old Fey.  I hope you all enjoy it.

Go forth and do good things,

Sean