A Writer's Burden

Ok, a bit of a grandiose title, but I'll start off my series of "things I learned in Europe" blogs by talking about the need to experience new things that is, to me, so much a part of being a writer.

It's pretty much common knowledge that having first-hand experience of a thing makes you better at recreating it. There's a reason that artists work from models, even when painting something imaginary. The same goes for writing, except that writing encompasses far more than just the visual. Experiencing something is the only thing that can truly make you understand every facet of it, and understanding that makes you much better able to reproduce it on the page.

In one sense, this is a blessing. It gives a sense of legitimacy to some things that might otherwise be considered entirely self-indulgent---like traveling for three weeks through Europe. It also provides a silver lining to even the worst situations. The deepest pain can be accepted because it makes you able to reproduce that pain in a way that others who have felt it will identify with and others who haven't will be able to gain a sense of it from. For me, it will allow me to do a lot of things I would love to do anyway, like go on a tallship cruise or learn how to swordfight, and call it work.

In another sense, however, this is a curse. For me personally it requires stretching my boundaries a lot further than I particularly enjoy doing. Traveling through Europe for three weeks was amazing in some senses and profoundly uncomfortable and difficult in others. And the kicker is that the discomfort and difficulty were as important for my writing as the amazingness.

Knowing what it's like to be a stranger in a strange land, to feel alone even when surrounded by others, to miss people so intensely that the world itself seems to turn to gray, and to be cold, wet, and lost are as important as knowing what it's like to look out from a castle wall over a sunlit river valley, hike through an emerald green forest in a snowstorm, or walk through the ruins of a two-thousand year old civilization, but the latter are a lot more enjoyable than the former.

There are other things that will be more difficult for me but that I must experience nonetheless. I should really find a time to push my body to the brink of complete exhaustion, seeing as I make my characters do it so often, and as much trauma as I've had trying to ride horses in the past, I need to learn how to do it if I ever want my characters to.

Even the aforementioned tallship cruise and swordfighting will not be completely enjoyable. Both of those things entail certain hardships in and of themselves, which is part of the reason they must be experienced, and anytime I'm in a situation I need to write about later there's a great mental drain just from trying to remember every sensation so acutely that I can reproduce it on the page in any way I like, whenever I need it.

I don't know that every author does these things, or even if they're completely necessary. But for me my writing has become the great work of my life, and everything else is subsumed to it. In order to be great, as I aspire to be, that is necessary. But it is not easy, it is not always enjoyable, and it is not always what I want to do. The amount of work that will be necessary to realize my dreams astounds me, and the realization that I will have to continue to do that work for the next ten or twenty years at least (if all goes according to plan) can at times be a very daunting one.

I know many writers have felt like this before, have dedicated themselves like this and have felt burdened at times by that dedication, but I wonder how many writers of fantasy have done it, and how it worked out for them. If anyone knows anything on that topic, I'd be curious to hear about it.