Jeopardy!, and what new experiences bring to writing

When I became pregnant with my daughter, I realized that not only was I, in essence, giving life to another person, but I would also be giving this person their first however many firsts. There are a lot of things that we do so often, even unthinkingly, that we may forget that there was once a time that we were trying it for the first time. My first breath, my first experience of the sun, my first step, my first wound, my first haircut, and the list goes on and on.

The older I become, there seem to be fewer moments of experiencing things for the first time. So, I made a promise to myself that every year, I would deliberately set out to try at least one fun/good/interesting thing for the first time.

Since then, I have experienced my first rodeo, my first drive-through car wash, my first taste of Lebanese breakfast, among others. To be fair, I also experienced some not-so-fun firsts such as my first ride in an ambulance.

At the beginning of 2020, my husband and I both took the Jeopardy! online test. It was the last of their scheduled tests (right before they launched the Jeopardy! Anytime test). I only took it because my husband said he wouldn’t take it otherwise, and I really wanted him to be on Jeopardy. We’d been fans of the show for a very long time (my daughter loves the Jeopardy! final question music), so it was also something fun to do together, a date night of sorts.

Months later, I get an email inviting me back for an audition, and long story short, I was able to add “being a Jeopardy! contestant” to my list of firsts for 2020. The whole process was a really interesting experience (especially in the midst of the COVID pandemic).

What does any of this have to do with writing? It’s not like you’re only allowed to write what you know, right? Yes, however, instead of breadth, I would say that new experiences give more depth to my writing in the following ways:

1. Empathy: When I experience new things, both good and bad, I’m able to become more empathetic because I’m able to pull on my memories of how I felt during these experiences, feelings that before I could only conjecture about. This can be in the big-picture changes in my life: raising a child for the first time; I’m able to more fully understand the joys and tribulations of being a parent, the constant guilt and the appreciation of the little things. But, it’s also in smaller moments, the anticipation and anxiety right as the Jeopardy! theme music starts playing as I’m standing on my podium. I could imagine it before, but now, I don’t have to rely solely on my imagination because I know exactly how I felt, the thoughts going through my mind, and then extrapolate that to the characters I write.
2. Reader Immersion: I’m able to conjure more complex sensory descriptions after experiencing it for myself. I remember the scent of the dust in the air at the rodeo. I can still feel the texture of the seat underneath my hands inside the ambulance, the way the sirens sounded from inside compared to how I remember hearing sirens passed me by on the street. These sense-memories are added to my writing toolbox to pull out whenever I want the reader to more fully immerse themselves in the world I’m creating.
3. Three-dimensional characters: People are weird. Everyone has their weird hobbies, secrets, quirks, and passions. To keep a character from being cliche or trope-ish, it helps to round them out with their own interesting characteristics, unique ways of thinking, or individual backgrounds. Being deliberate about new experiences has me seeking out unexplored avenues that often lead to not only meeting cool new people, but pointing me down avenues I never even knew existed in the first place.
4. New Ideas: Related to the above idea, when I experience new things and meet new people, I often learn interesting things that can spark ideas for stories, plotlines, or even new characters. What seems to set people who are decent at trivia apart is their insatiable curiosity about anything and everything, whether or not it will be “useful” in their day-to-day lives. I never know when I turn the next corner, if something I learn will spin out into something new, such as when a short historical fact I heard on a tour of a garden in China turned into a published story of a Dowager Empress and her imprisoned Emperor son.

I hope you will seek out new experiences in your lives as well. Not just to enrich your writing, but also to have something delightful in the midst of hectic regular life (made even more crazy by recent ongoing events).