How much life experience do you need to be a writer?
Familiar with the assertion that life experience is crucial to being a good writer? I’ve been wondering recently how much and in what ways this is true.
Life experience?
And yet, despite my
lack of exceptional living,
or living exceptionally,
I have written
through all of it.
That oft-repeated advice to get out there and live before you put pen to paper leaves a bad taste in my mouth. It feels like an odd form of shaming, pointing the finger at the young or inexperienced or ordinary among us and saying, “You cannot have anything of interest to share with the world.” By that logic, I have suffered the dull fate of a middle-class, American upbringing, complete with malls and a car at sixteen. It was a 1985 Chevy Citation that my parents bought off a neighbor—not exactly a luxury mobile, but it got me to my after school job and play rehearsals. How can art come of such stability? Such comfort? Such privilege? Add to my standard upbringing, the fact that there were no real revolutions to join. I tried. I was active in Amnesty International and did take a road trip from Wisconsin to Washington DC to protest the Gulf War, but it was hardly notable in the end. No ambulance driving. No Parisian salons. No immigrant experience. No family tragedies marked by addiction or illness. No tremendous heartache. “How dare I attempt to make literature from such banal beginnings?” that old tenet seems to demand.
And yet, despite my lack of exceptional living, or living exceptionally, I have written through all of it.
Two points here.
One. Interesting people and their lives are found in the dullest of settings. In fact, the extraordinary exists simultaneously with and beneath the ordinary even when those involved strive (sometimes desperately) to maintain the status quo. See Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates, Ordinary People by Judith Guest, The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides, to name but a few novels. Writing about normal people in commonplace settings is not about holding up the trivial. It is about revealing our humanity to ourselves, about uncovering the exceptional truths of mere existence.
Two. Imagination is unlimited. We are free to imagine anything we like, realistic or fantastic, experienced or dreamt. This means we do not need to have lived what we write. If that were true, all writers would be diarists and most of us would quit writing immediately. Dear Diary, Today Billy called on me. I served him lemonade on the porch. What strange creatures we storytellers would be in a world without creative license. I may want to write a plain character in a normal world, but the story must quickly launch into the wilds of the human experience. If serving Billy lemonade on the porch features, it must be about something beyond the obvious activity on the page. Heartache, perhaps?
If we are free to imagine what we will, what is the role of experience in our writing?
Our experience is the foundation of our imagining. It is from this place of having lived through a thing that we can invent it or its correlate on the page. Writers are compelled to mine their experiences in order to create verisimilitude, to bring a new experience to the reader in its essence, so that the reader lives that experience vicariously through the character.
It is not enough as writers of novels to put action on the stage of the page. The man stands back in the corner of the hospital room, watching his wife weep over their child’s body. That is not an experience. That is a tableau, a stage direction. It leaves the reader to imagine the experience for herself. To do that, to leave the reader either wanting the experience of the thing on the page or left to create it for herself, is to fail as a novelist. The playwright and scriptwriter can leave experience off the page, because they rely on an actor to turn action into experience, to create feeling that moves the audience. The novelist has no intermediary between the word and the reader. The novelist, however, is narrator. And narrative holds the key to both exposition and point of view, allowing the novelist to go where the playwright cannot.
Inside.
I call this interiority, and it is the special domain of the written narrative.
Empathy experience.
The power of a novel
comes from the
emotional energy
the writer transfers through
his narrative to his reader.
Within the novel, readers get to enter the head of the character. They also, and more importantly, get to experience feelings, both sensory and emotional, through the power of narrative exposition, which is the description of the sensory or emotional sensation the author puts on the page. A character’s thoughts can be simulated in film through the voiceover—successfully, too. See the opening and closing scenes of American Beauty in which Lester Bernham narrates his moment of death (1999), or the teen series Awkward, in which Jenna’s voiceover gives the audience insight into the character’s inner world (2011-2016). While film does have its methods for creating a sense of interiority, it relies on transporting the audience through visual and aural stimulus. We see the action. We hear the music. We begin to identify with the actor visibly and audibly emoting on the screen. Novels do it quietly through words, words and nothing else. Those words describe the character’s experience, then create the reader’s experience, and it’s all done inside. Inside the pages of the book, inside the reader’s mind. The experience of interiority is created for and within the reader.
There is power in subtlety.
Any decent writer can describe action. The car crashing, the door slamming, the person sobbing, the jump of surprise, the laugh of delight. These are all see-and-do things. Things an actor could show on a stage, even a poor actor with a wooden face. The power of a play comes from the emotional energy the actor transfers through his performance to his audience. The power of a novel comes from the emotional energy the writer transfers through his narrative to his reader. Life experience necessarily plays a role in the writer’s process and the prose’s effective reach. But is it the only thing that matters?
Fortunately, one’s life does not have to be lived on a grand or dangerous scale to be real, to create the depth of feeling and understanding necessary to write convincingly of experiences one can only imagine. What is required of any novelist, far and above experience, is the power of empathy. The writer must take her lived experience, however diminutive compared to that of her character, and explore, expand, and create whatever is needed to bring the character’s experience to life for the reader.
In this way, the writer and reader share a powerful moment of lived experience—if not physically, tangibly, then emotionally, empathetically—through the character’s experience on the page. And this subtle, interior, shared experience becomes lived again and again through the power of human empathy every time it touches another reader.
