Writing What I Know

I'm a big believer in learning. This is funny, especially from the perspective of someone who's seen my report cards. Yeah, sure, I'll throw myself under the bus a little. Sometimes it takes time to figure out how to become a student. And I'm not talking about school, no... School's got the foundations and building blocks for a lot of things, but it is not the first place you will learn things in your life and I sincerely hope it won't be the last. 

Schools are nice from the perspective that they're built to be learning environments. It's a place you go to study, to further your knowledge and understanding. The goal is to teach logic and reasoning, critical thinking. Fundamentally, we all know that not everyone learns the same way, but it would certainly be easier if we did. It would make school a helluva lot more universally beneficial. It would probably be way less costly than it is in the United States, at least. It may even go on for longer, regardless of the field you were going into, just because if there were a neat uniform way to convey information that worked for EVERYONE, then holy cow what a breakthrough, please teach the world this way.

Today I received a piece of advice (well I received a whole lot of advice but this is the pertinent bit) - I was urged to write about what I actually learned in college. College is a place of higher education. I learned a great deal. But college is also a timeframe for learning. There's this insane learning curve for mental and emotional maturation and life lessons. The general expectation is that you leave as an adult prepared for adult world times. The reality of these expectations are pretty off base, in my humble opinion. It's a great start, but it can also veer you into a land of unreasonable expectations about the life you may lead. It all boils down to everyone's experiences being different (wow). 

I definitely learned a great deal both in classes in college, and in the life around college, and that'll be an enormous chunk of personal writing I will probably have to do some serious soul-searching on before I slap it on the internet for all to see. Regardless, what I know from those years of experience doesn't cap off my learning, and far from it. It's corny, but being a 'student of life' is an apt way to put it. I've researched a ton of seemingly useless or irrelevant topics in my life. Anytime someone wants to share details about a project they are working on, no matter what it is, I try to listen and understand what they are up to. 

Because - and here's the really neat thing - you can write about literally anything. It's all knowledge, it's all important. One of the first pieces of advice my class of first year writing peers and I were given in school was to write what we know. So why not try to know as MUCH as you possibly can? Any other way about it makes your writing narrower, limited. I may not be a computer engineer, or an alpaca herder, or a brain surgeon, or a white collar criminal, but I may want to write about people who are, and I'd hate to not do my future characters justice.