i gotta say, if you’re a writer, one of the most important things you can do to write better is to go out and get your hands messy doing the things you wanna write about.
obviously, don’t go fight to the death on mars. but like, learn some stuff. take some risks. get your heart broken. swordfight. sew. hitch a ride on a train. own a cat. buy some drugs. fall out of a tree. drive cross-country. get lost in the rain at midnight somewhere in portland’s bombed-out old factory district and carry a length of pipe for ten city blocks because there’s no street lights and you’re pretty sure you’re going to be eaten by demons and you’re kind of hoping you will at least get to hit a demon in the face with a pipe— just, have some genuinely disastrous fucking adventures where you cry and hate everything and hate yourself and then tell the whole story next day to your friend while laughing because you survived. punch a guy. swim in a pond. eat a bug. have at least one really good nemesis at all times.
to tell stories, you have to have stories. to have stories you have to live. it’s more useful to think of yourself not as a protagonist but as a first draft. make as much stuff happen as you can and then learn to put it into some kind of order, learn pull some kind of meaning out of it all.
then, when you sit down to write, you’re gonna have more to say. and you’ll have had a hell of a time along the way, too.
I disagree, though I’m someone who did many of the above by the time I was in my early 20s, because I’m kind of a dumbass and “sure, why not?” were three words I really needed to stop letting come out of my mouth and, for the most part, have. And, sure, some of that’s been vaguely helpful: I had some pretty good future location scouting done that way, I know how certain drugs work, I know a lot about the messiness of sex and love and interstate roadtrips, but…
I also know a lot of people who are amazing writers (I don’t use that term lightly: my group of intimates has a disproportionate number of professional writers somehow and they skew my perception) who haven’t done any of that. They have mobility limitations. They have financial limitations. They have mental health limitations. They have other obligations that make doing any of the above an impossibility.
The only thing they really have in common is an intense curiosity that feeds into a vivid imagination. They read, they research, they ask questions, and they absorb as much information about the things they cannot do as possible.
I mean, let’s face it: the Brontës didn’t get out much. Neither did Elizabeth Barrett Browning. An adventuresome life is not a prerequisite for an adventuresome mind.
Ain’t no one want to see me sword fight
hawberries
