Writing from Experience

This week's topic: writing from experience. Many years ago I went and listened to Alice Walker, who wrote The Color Purple, speak about writing. I was in my twenties and eager to make it as a writer. As is the case with most young people, I thought I had the emotional depth to tackle any subject. Walker said she didn't hit her stride as a writer until she hit her forties. Screeeeeccchhhh! What? She added, she didn't feel she could have written her great works as a young writer without experience to tell the story right (I'm paraphrasing).

 

I was young. I wanted to write - and I wanted to write something that would resonate with people, make them think. Was I too young, as Walker was suggesting? The answer is complicated. As writers we do need experience to pull from, which gives us a frame of reference. Can you still write about something you've never experienced? Yes, but it's still based on a frame of reference. You write from your knowledge of something that you can emotionally get a grip on.

 

Writing is one part reality, one part imagination, and one part understanding of both. (Bet you haven't heard that one before.) The ideas in your work (even if in fantasy or sci-fi) still need to be grounded in basic human understanding or principles of the world and nature. As we write, we heighten these ideas and maybe twist and turn them (that's the imagination part). We use reality as our basis for creativity.

 

So what if we've got no experience with certain realities? Then what? You're guessing, and when you guess your work loses authenticity. When you surmise how something must have felt with no basis in experience, you can do it, but you can't go as deeply as someone who knows, who experienced it.

 

Now I'm not saying you can't write about, for example, going to war if you've never gone to war. I am saying that if you write about something as violent as war; as scary as war, your work will suffer without any reference to pull from. So what can you do? Go to war? No, you can interview someone who has gone. There's a trick though that you can apply. The common emotions - fear, anger, aggression - that come from your life and apply it to your work to describe those feelings in your work.

 

So to answer Walker's opinion, it does help to know what you're talking about. Do I think young writers can't do the same level of work in their twenties as their forties or fifties or sixties? I think the best perspective is that the work will change, evolve, and mature just like anything does. It really does put more realism and passion and perspective when you've experienced what you're describing. I know in my own work that my "truth" helps convey it in a deeper way than without it.

 

One last note, don't be afraid to dig deep into your emotional well to pull the most beautiful writing out. When we speak from the heart it will sing!