Thoughts on Writing

So the last few weeks, we've been watching our dvds of Deep Space 9. This show is by far my favorite of the Trek series (followed by The Next Generation, The Original Series, Enterprise, and with Voyager coming in dead last). To me, it's the most complex and the most human of the various series. The storylines tend to be dark and the characters are wonderfully developed as the series goes on. Additionally, in re-watching the series, I can clearly see where the seeds of the new Battlestar Galactica are germinating in Ron Moore's head which is a beautiful thing, indeed.

Last night, we were watching the episode titled Explorers where Commander Sisko builds a small ship based on an ancient Bajoran design. He then sets out to test whether the ship could have actually made the trip to the Cardassia system as legend says. It's a nice little episode of father-son bonding since Sisko has convinced his son, Jake, to go along for the ride.

However, what specifically prompted this blog post was an off-hand comment that was made by Sisko. Jake, it turns out, is a burgeoning writer and finally works up the courage to share one of his stories with his father. The story is from the perspective of a Maquis fighter (for those who know Trek, the Maquis are a resistance group that were formed to fight the Cardassians when they were ordered to leave their colonies in the wake of treaty negotiations with the Cardassians that put the Federation colonists in Cardassian territory). Sisko tells Jake that one cannot write about things that one has not actually experienced and it's that statement that stuck with me all night.

With profound respect to the writers of DS9, I think that Sisko's argument should've been more along the lines of one cannot write what one does not know. That is to say, you should take the time to research your subject and become familiar with it. If a writer were only to write what they have actually experienced first-hand, we wouldn't have things like Star Trek at all since interstellar space travel and alien species are not part of our reality at this point in our existence. 

I seriously doubt that Thomas Harris or Jeff Lindsay embarked upon careers as serial killers to bring us characters like Hannibal Lector or Dexter. Furthermore, we would lack significant works of fantasy and science-fiction if we only wrote what we know. Certainly Captain Tolkien never infiltrated a dragon's lair as Bilbo did with Smaug, but that doesn't mean he didn't write it well.

My point here is that if you have experience with what you're writing, that's fabulous and I think that you should definitely bring that to the page. However, if you don't, that shouldn't hold you back from writing what it is that you want to write.