The Intrinsic Value of Doing

Ruminations on authenticity and the usefulness of firsthand experiences when writing fiction.

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Synchronicity is an interesting concept. Among those familiar with it, depending on who you ask, it can be impactful on our lives in a myriad of ways both mundane and spiritual. Frankly, I don’t feel as though I have the strongest grasp of those latter impacts, but then I’ve made it no secret that I’m not a particularly spiritual person. Even so, I can understand the appeal of the concept for folks out there who are, especially in the moments where I notice its effects. Such was the case earlier this morning, when I ran across what is at the time of writing, the following two-day-old Note from

Librarian of Celaeno

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For the sake of posterity, or for those of you who’ve no desire to actually click the note to read it, you can see the main body of text below:

“Just the other day, my oldest daughter, 6, was telling me how the some older kids in her microschool were crazy about video games. I told her that might be fine for them, but our family reads books. Every summer, when I’m off from teaching, we have Daddy School, where she and her sister, 5, are Adventure Girls (“Adventure Girls are brave and strong and smart and tough and kind, with love”) and we read in the morning and hit nature in the afternoon. I’m glad I have a lifestyle that allows this, and honestly I’d rather have an aristocrat’s freedom than his money. No matter what, you can always leave them something.”

The subject of video game addiction and the value that young people, in particular young men, could find by turning their energies towards hobbies with more tangible rewards is one that the good Librarian has touched on a handful of times now. As a man who once strove to break into the video games industry to create the very sorts of games I enjoyed playing in my youth, I find myself agreeing with him in large part, especially when it comes to the addictive element he’s talked about in said games. I’ve become far more discerning about what I play as I’ve gotten older, with the vast majority of games these days largely holding little to no interest for me. Quite the far cry from someone who, as a teen, happily labeled himself a gamer and a nerd; two labels which found a particularly tidy intersection in my love of the tabletop gaming hobby, but that is another story for another time.

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Discerning though I’ve become, (which includes being more careful about how much time I spend with video games) there still exist those games which can sink their teeth into me and keep firm hold. Final Fantasy XIV is one of them, and probably the worst of them in terms of the time investment considering its evergreen nature. I find the story to be generally compelling and enjoy playing through both new and old content with my friends as and where I can. From Software’s action RPGs - Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and particularly Elden Ring since its new expansion on the horizon - are other major draws for me. I enjoy the specific brand of challenge those games provide and find deep satisfaction in digging into the scattered lore not just to fashion my own hypotheses about the stories of these worlds, but to hear the ideas others have as well.

What does any of this have to do with synchronicity, though? Equally important, what does this have to do with writing fiction? We’ll tackle the former first, beginning with a little anecdote. After getting home from work on Thursday night to find a hungry cat and a sink full of dishes waiting for me, I promptly plugged my headphones into my phone, hopped over to YouTube, and started playing the livestream below in the background as I got to work:

For those unawares, this is the Terran Tuesdays stream, which is hosted by my fellow fantasy and sci-fi fiction contemporaries

The Black Knight

, author of the Starshatter space opera novels;

James Esparza

of The World Without End; and the always lovely

R. H. Snow

, author of the award winning weird western Watcher of the Damned novels. As you can see this is only their third entry, so it’s safe to say this is still something of a nascent project for them. Nascent though it is, they bring a good many valuable insights on ways in which we fiction authors can enrich our written worlds. Such was the case with this most recent stream of theirs, wherein the trio discussed the values and impacts that handicrafts, as well as the skills needed to make them, can and should have on the characters and settings of our stories, fantasy in particular.

Now I imagine some of you out there are probably thinking that’s pretty obvious. Of course handicrafts are going to be important in fantasy. Most fantasy stories are set in low technology worlds that hearken back to the Renaissance, the Middle Ages, or even earlier. They didn’t have the modern technological comforts we take for granted today, and that’s precisely the point that the Terran Tuesday trio (love that alliteration) is attempting to make - we fantasy writers are often working with worlds where people are far removed from the modern comforts we take for granted. How, then, are we going to present these worlds in such a way as to make them feel authentic?

Again, I’m sure many of you out there will say the answer is simple, we do research, and you’d be absolutely right to say that. However, not all research is created equal. Just as important as determining what we need to understand to make our stories and worlds feel authentic is determining how best to understand it. Pay attention now, because this is where the synchronicity comes into play. Somewhere around the halfway mark of the stream, possibly a little bit later than that, Mrs. Snow raises a very good point about a particular challenge faced by young writers looking to begin their journey: the outsized influence of video games.

Before we continue on, I’d like to clarify said influence in more specific terms. There are a number of fantasy stories out there which explore the idea of people either living in or being transported to worlds which are based on video games. Japan in particular has produced a good number of these through various light novels, manga, and anime, many of which fall under the conceptual umbrella of isekai. For those unawares of what isekai is, the term effectively translates to “other world” and tends to involve the trope of a normal person from our modern age suddenly finding themselves transplanted into a fantastical world far removed from our own.

There are many ways in which this concept can be approached, with some stories like The Saga of Tanya the Evil being much darker and more serious, while others like The Devil is a Part-Timer flip the script on its head by sending creatures from a fantasy world into our own and forcing them to live as normal humans for the sake of comedic shenanigans. By far the most common approach, though, is to have your average Joe or Jane - though perhaps Jin or Jun would be more appropriate names - get pulled from our world into fantasy lands. Where the video game influence comes in are the multiple cases where said fantasy lands are actual video games in these settings, such as with Sword Art Online or the vastly more interesting Overlord. Other cases, like the raunchy and uproarious Konosuba, showcase RPG-like systems of levels, classes, and associated skills and spells as the core magic systems without the world itself literally being a video game world.

Regardless of the approach taken in stories like this, the development and use of hard mechanical systems reminiscent of, or sometimes taken directly from video games provides its own set of unique challenges to the writers of these stories. Challenges that, in my personal opinion, present hurdles that said writers rarely manage to overcome. In fact, while I’ll admit isekai isn’t a trope I actively seek out, I’ve found myself watching many an isekai with my wife or some of my friends over the years. All of the titles I mentioned above are included in this list, as well as a handful of others, and of those which opted to use video game systems as their magic systems, I can count on one hand the times I’ve seen it integrated well: Overlord, because we’re not just actively shown that the main character is a top player of the game he’s transported into, but the story takes care to avoid letting those systems become distracting and invasive; and Konosuba, because its game-like system is frequently used to play into the raunchy and irreverent comedy at its heart.

I’ll admit here and now that in general terms, I’m not a fan of this approach. I find the game systems as magic systems idea to be hackneyed and distracting in the majority of cases, doubly so as someone who spent a solid four years of his college life majoring in game design. As I said earlier, I once strove to break into the industry. Game design was one of the four majors I followed in college, the other three being German, geology, and the one with the most major impact on my life, English Literature, which is the umbrella under which the numerous fiction workshop classes I took were placed. Because of this, when I see stories attempt to use this approach I’m usually able to quickly spot the ways in which the mechanics as magic idea often clashes with the story that’s being told. Most of the time that clash results from the twin cuts of not understanding how to develop an elegant system that works with the story being told and/or not understanding how to implement the chosen system in a way that doesn’t come off as invasive and distracting, or worse, like blatant use of deus ex machina.

All of this is effectively to say that this approach comes with its own set of unique challenges to overcome, ones which I’d argue are even more difficult than the already imposing challenge of fashioning fantasy worlds that feel lived in and authentic. Fortunately one of the best methods for overcoming both of these challenges is the same at its core, the development of related skills with hands on experience.

I’m sure every writer here has been given the “write what you know” advice before. I’m also sure that many, if not most of you probably took that to mean that you should only write about the types of things you’re knowledgeable about. I know I did when I was younger, but as I’ve aged, I’ve realized this advice could be taken in an entirely different and more constructive way. When this advice is given, at least in my experiences, it’s usually done as a warning not to venture too far into topics you don’t understand within your fiction. The reason for this is pretty clear; if you start writing about something you don’t really understand, then people who do understand that topic will be able to easily point to your errors, thus you risk harming their potential investment in your story.

However, I’ve often had the unfortunate experience of seeing this advice given as a criticism meant to dissuade writers from approaching topics they don’t have deep knowledge of. Not only is this a thoroughly negative way to use this phrase, turning it from a long standing piece of advice into a verbal cudgel, it shows what I believe to be a fundamental misunderstanding (or intentional misuse) of the phrase’s point. As I hinted at earlier, “write what you know” doesn’t mean to only write the things you know about in the here and now. Rather, it’s meant to act as encouragement to research the subjects you don’t know as well so that you can build an understanding of them, thereby improving the feeling of authenticity in your stories.

Recall, though, that I stated earlier that not all research is created equal. This is true, especially in the highly interconnected, technology driven age we live in today. We exist in a time where the greater sum of human knowledge is accessible with but a few taps and swipes of our fingers. Through our phones and the internet they connect to, we carry not just fountains worth of information in our pockets, but volcanoes worth. This is fantastic for helping us fiction writers get a handle on certain elements that might be present in our stories which we don’t fully understand. To use an example from my own writing, because I set my novella, In the Giant’s Shadow, in a location roughly equivalent to a farming village in Viking age Norway, I needed to know what sort of fruits, vegetables, grains, and livestock the people of that age and that region might raise. This was easy enough for me to figure out with a few targeted searches and some light reading, which was plenty enough to serve the needs of that story.

However, if for some reason I needed to go into the specific details of what the daily toils of raising those animals or tending those crops was like, basic research might not be enough to allow me to paint an authentic picture with my words. That’s where hands on experience becomes a wonderful thing. Sure, I haven’t grown cloudberries or wheat before, nor have I grown up on a farm. But I’ve helped my wife grow fruits and vegetables in our own garden, including strawberries, and experienced firsthand how challenging it can be to get that bush to produce those little red gems. I’ve done manual labor for hours on end before, so I have an idea about how that can make the body feel. I’ve tried to dig through the hard packed, rock-filled dirt in the various yards I’ve had at the various homes I’ve lived in from childhood to adulthood, all experiences that I can draw from and relate in some way to the toil of those farmers. They aren’t one for one experiences, but they’re close enough that I can relay those sensations in a way that feels recognizably authentic.

But what if I needed more specific and specialized descriptions than that? For example, what if I wanted to make my readers really feel like they understood what it’s like to wear a chainmail shirt? What if I wanted them to know how heavy gloves feel on one’s hand, right down to the specific ways they interfere with our dexterity? Or let’s say I want to get really specialized and showcase a jeweler working precious metals into fine jewelry. How do I best do this?

I chose these specific examples for a couple reasons. Firstly, in the case of the armor, because that’s the sort of detail that’s very frequently glossed over in fantasy fiction. It’s not very often that we’re shown the fatiguing effects of wearing heavy armor for an extended period, or the way in which even thin gloves will adversely affect your manual dexterity. If you don’t believe me with that latter one, try putting on a pair of dish gloves or thin work gloves and typing out a few sentences on your keyboard. You’ll quickly find that it’s quite a bit harder to do effectively because of how the gloves interfere with the movement and feeling of your hands. Then go put on a pair of heavy leather work gloves or thick snow gloves and try to do anything you normally would that requires a lot of manual dexterity. See how well you perform there, and then consider the kind of precise work one might have to do with one’s hands while wearing similarly unwieldy equipment. These are the sorts of details we’re likely to gloss over in fiction, but in reality, they can have a profound impact on our performance.

In the case of the jeweling, I chose this example because it’s a craft I’ve gained hands on experience in. During my last couple years working in the food service industry, I briefly went back to school specifically to learn silversmithing and similar jeweling techniques. The goal at the time was to create hand crafted gifts and possibly open an online storefront, but I ultimately had to give up the pursuit due to a change in my career and work schedule, as well as the expense involved. In the end I only successfully created a small handful of pieces, but the techniques I learned in that class were all modern variations of jewelry making methods that have been used for centuries upon centuries. Because of the hands on experience those classes gave, I know what the heat of a small forge feels like. I know how to cast silver, gold, and other precious gems into rings, amulets, brooches, and so on. I learned how to carve wax, to pack the molds, the proper way to anneal and melt down precious metals, and how to shape them with hammers, saws, crank controlled rolling presses, and so on.

This isn’t to say go out there and start putting in your 10,000 hours on any skill or craft you want to showcase in your fiction. I certainly didn’t spend that amount of time with jewelry making, yet my experiences there allowed me to gain extra levels of insight into how that trade works. It’s a handicraft that I know not because I researched it online, but because I experienced it directly. This is why I greatly dislike the use of the phrase “write what you know” as an admonition, and prefer to look at it as an invitation to start broadening your real world experiences and skills so you can build a wealth of direct knowledge to draw on with your writing. By doing so you allow yourself to draw on the authentic experience of creating something, the genuine feeling of working with your hands as you go through the process of creation, as opposed to describing it in the way one might when looking at it through the lens of Minecraft, Skyrim, or even Elden Ring, to partly steal an example used by Mrs. Snow.

Yet with that being said, there is a bit of an elephant in the room here. Not all of us who wish to write about these things are in a position to learn about them directly. Not all of us can experience these things, so what do we do then?

First and foremost, I’d recommend drawing from experiences that can be easily related to the topic at hand. I mentioned before that I had experience in working with chainmail and experienced the way working with heavy gloves can hamper one’s dexterity first hand. While the chainmail I referenced was specifically that of a chain shirt, and yes I did have the opportunity to wear a chain shirt designed to act as an actual piece of armor when I visited Norway back in 2011, that was a one time experience. The vast majority of my experiences with chainmail came when I worked in the butcher block of the last grocery store I worked at.

For those unawares, chainmail still sees regular use today, and technically it’s still as a piece of armor. Butchers and fishmongers will often use chainmail gloves to protect their hands when they’re preparing meats for sale. In much of the world this work is also done in a refrigerated environment, meaning these men and women are often also wearing thick cloth gloves to keep their hands warm and possibly plastic or latex gloves to keep them clean. That’s two to three sets of gloves worn over each other when doing this work, and that experience is what taught me just how severe the impact of wearing thick gloves can be on one’s manual dexterity. Did I don the chainmail as armor and go to war to fight my enemies head to head? No, of course not. But by combining the experiences with it that I do have with a little bit of extra research, I can quite easily put together a convincingly authentic image of what it would be like to move and maneuver around in that sort of equipment.

The second good option you have if you can’t go seeking those experiences yourself is to seek out people who have had them. You might be surprised at the incredible wealth of esoteric knowledge people can have that’s useful to your stories. Ask your friends and family members about these things, see if they know about them themselves or if they know someone who does. As an example, where I made an effort to learn jeweling and silversmithing, one of my friends was learning blacksmithing from a local instructor around the same time. Neither of us were able to pursue it for as long as we’d have liked, but the knowledge we gained and the memories of how it felt working those particular trades stuck with us both. A similar case can be said of some of my old coworkers and fishing, a sport some of them engaged in regularly; or my wife when it comes to crochet and sewing, and so on and so forth.

Finally, I’d also suggest looking for local events and attractions that might be able to provide you with more of the tangible information and experiences your looking for. Touching on one last example from my own life, abandoned gold mines can be found by heading northeast into the mountains within my county. Many of these mines are closed off to the public for obvious safety reasons, but a couple of them regularly run educational tours where the guides will go over the techniques and processes used by those gold rush era miners to find and extract seams of gold from the mountains. Being able to see the tools and machines they used, as well as walking through the tunnels themselves, is a great way to build a basic understanding of how that sort of thing worked, but that’s not the experience that most stuck with me when I went on one of these tours with my wife on our last anniversary. For as much as I remember the information our guide gave us, it pales in comparison to the tactile sensations I had being in that mine.

Hearing the way our voices and the crunch of our footsteps echoed off the rock walls.

Turning off the electric lights to see just how dark those tunnels got when candles burnt out.

Seeing how the minimal light of the types of candles the miners used made it easier for them to spot gold, all because of how the firelight reflected off of it.

The smell of the dust on the air.

The feel of the air cooling as we went inside, dropping from the 80F (26.6C) late summer morning to a cool 61F (16C) throughout the entirety of the mine, a temperature which hardly ever fluctuates.

To my mind, the sensations that come from firsthand doing encapsulate the idea of “write what you know” at its absolute best. They’re the sorts of experiences that we’re best able to translate into relatable and authentic terms because they are both of these things in and of themselves. You experienced them, ergo you can relate to them. All that needs be done from that point is translating those experiences into words that convey that feeling to your readers. This is the intrinsic value of doing when it comes to writing fiction, and it’s key to helping the worlds you’re fashioning feel lived in and real.

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