Somewhere, sometime, someone gave me a piece of advice regarding the writing process.  The source escapes me as so many actually useful facts do, but the advice, delivered in a pleasantly bland north american accent, goes as follows: write what you know.  What I gained from this advice at the time was that, like such authors as Keith Laumer (who was in fact once a diplomat) and Steven Brust (or is it Jim Butcher?) (who is described as being proficient in a large number of antiquated skills) I should gather together what experiences I can from my own life and mold them into something new, expressive, and hopefully marketable.

As I’ve grown older, however, two distinct flaws (discovered during an attempt at practical application) have made themselves known to me.  One is that I am a teenager.  A fairly average teenager.  Therefore my life experience is fairly limited.  I can make the daily happenings in my life seem exciting by making oblique references to Greek tragedies and the like, but in the end all I’m doing is gilding a slowly dying dandelion in the vain hope of making it more interesting than it actually is.  The other problem is that, in order to write about what you know, you have to actually know something about yourself.  So far what I’ve come up with can be tallied on one hand.

1) I’m far older than I feel and far younger than I think.

2) I have rather few emotions and don’t like any of them.

3) I’m very bad at making lists.

Do you see what I mean?  The list goes on to say that I have no talent to speak of except for what I’ve stolen from others (and I don’t mean plagiarism, there’s no profit in that.  I take only the ability to write, not what is written), and despite the fact that I have had a number of experiences in my life, only the most recent ones could be accurately attributed to me.  (This, of course, makes five points, which is the same number on fingers on the human hand unless you a) are the six-fingered man, or b) have had one or more of your fingers amputated for one reason or another.  However, for illustrative and aesthetic reasons, I only bulleted three.  One would have worked even better, really, but that seemed kind of ridiculous at the time.)

There’s a character in a Nero Wolfe story, Priscilla Eades, who is described as having a habit of regularly and radically changing her personality every couple of years.  Why wait years when a month or two is just around the corner?  I’ve been trying to give up the person (or people, or something) I was two years ago for, well, two years.  Every couple of months I find that I’m slipping, and off I go in a different direction.

I never much liked the person I was, not that there was anything particularly wrong with me.  I think that if I hadn’t been overtaken by an uncontrollable fit of wanderlust sophomore year I’d be perfectly content to be the same.  But I did what I did, and I met who I met, and I was overtaken.  The journey has been interesting to say the least, but as much as I like the road less travelled, there are some incredibly deep ruts from those who have come before me (few and far between though they are) and my bicycle keeps getting stuck.  So the question comes up of whether or not it would be easier to just turn back, rewind the clock, and start over the last two years as the person I was before.

I was happy then (if not content).  Now I’m right.  So logically I’m correct about the fact that I’m moving slowly from “stupid” to “crazy” and upsetting the balance which was once stipulated quite clearly in the contract I signed.

Ignorance is bliss.

I’d rather be happy than right any day.

But I digress.

The point is, how can I write what I know when there isn’t much to know, and what little there really is I don’t even like?  The answer is that I don’t.  I write fantasy because one of the things I do like about myself (as I was and as I am) is that I have an exceptionally over-active imagination, so much so that the boundaries of the tangible universe and my own mind are no longer nearly as defined as they probably ought to be.  Unfortunately, this is also one of the facts about myself which I have not yet come to a satisfactory conclusion about.  So it doesn’t go on the list of things I know about myself (since those are facts and this is only fairly concrete speculation).

But I digress again.  I write fantasy.

I’ve also found overtime that my perspective on things is kind of boring.  If you asked my mother, she’d say that this a sign of series self-esteem issues and I should probably see someone with a degree in this sort of thing (which would be pointless, if you ask me, since I have seen people with degrees in largely useless fields before and I’m here to tell you that I’ve gotten better advice from fortune cookies and the players’ guide for the Wheel of Time RPG).  As such I write from the point of view of others, both actual other people and the people I hope to be someday.  I find it much easier, to write about something I don’t really know anything about from the perspective of someone I may never have met in anything resembling a real sense.

“If you can’t dazzle them with dexterity, baffle them with bullshit.”

I should add a sixth bullet to that list.  It will break my previous statement that everything I know about myself can be tallied on one hand, but maybe I am the six-fingered man.  Who really cares, anyway?  One and hand one toe, perhaps.

I know that I have always wanted to be someone else.  The only way to truly achieve that in this stage, this phase, of my life is through writing.  Perhaps one day one of my alternate realities will exist.  Until then, I’ll keep changing in the hope of finally getting it righ.