Write your experience

Last night I was scrolling through my tablet looking for crap to delete because I'm running out of room and came across an untitled doc I'd created in August. Clearly there was booze involved because I had zero memory of writing it until I read it again last night. It was just a simple scene describing the Georgia heat and humidity, which I actually love, but I'd written it from the perspective of someone who found it oppressive. I was a little floored at how well it read and will likely incorporate a big part of it into my wip. (There's something really freakin' awesome about reading something you wrote and thinking, "Holy crap, this is really good!") and (Of course my first thought was maybe I should write drunk more often!)

Sometimes it's about the ability to imagine a scene, a setting, or an emotion from a perspective different than your own. If you've had any interaction with other humans, you should be able to do that with some degree of understanding and make it realistic, even if it isn't something you've personally felt or experienced. And that's also where research comes in. I've never had grandparents, but my MC does because it's important to the story, so I called a good friend and asked about her relationship with her grandparents. I've always imagined grandparents as these amazing creatures that spoil you rotten and fix everything that's wrong in your world. Turns out, Katherine's grandfather was a hard ass who had been known to brawl and her grandmother's idea of an awesome Christmas present was a loaf of fruit cake. Store bought. But Katherine adored them and they her. It just wasn't what I'd imagined and helped me inject reality into the characters in my story.

 

Dammit, this reads like a nosleep story. Also had some drunk writing bouts but remember them.

 

I like the sentiment here, but (personally) it feels cliche. Don't get me wrong, I believe what it says about family. But businesses should pay a living wage (I know whole other topic), even if they have to raise the prices a bit. No one should work full time, and not have enough to eat.

 

I agree. It's sappy as hell.

 

I also am suspicious of the story, though I know kind of similar things have happened.

As for the need to get out I get that, except that nearly all of us do get out, and have been out. The key, to me, is to look inside and process what we have seen while we were out, what we've read, what we dreamed, what we think and thought, what people said to us, and so on. I'd suggest we all have a universe of experience already. Of course, if you want to write about Istanbul or Kabul, you'd need to have been there, or at least gorged on credible travel books.

I remember (so this is a paraphrase) of a scene in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, where the MC, a creative writing professor at a U, tells student who feels stuck, to think of her hometown. Still stuck, so he says, think of your house. Still stuck, so he says, think of one brick in the wall of your house. Something clicks and she begin to write, and builds out from that. Everything is part of everything else, the key is to find a starting point. IMHO.

 

I'm not going to read it again. It's some kind of FB schlock if I recall?

As I was beating my children I remember being overcome in angelic light, thinking maybe if I might turn those smacks of thunder to smacks of goodness we might all find redemption in our cabins. Now I beat my children for Jesus and also beat myself at the same time.. Here's a picture of Jesus

 

I think he approves.

 

It's pure glurge.

Apart from the story itself (the generous diner) being something of an internet cliche, it's couched in religious language that appeals to a certain demographic (in my country that would be a handful of elderly people and some West African immigrants) but induces eye-rolling or derisive snorting in almost everyone else while apparently implying that it's okay to have people working full-time jobs and living rough with their kids because praying will make everything okay in the end.

It's poisonous, is what it is.

 

Good things happen to good people @Moose. That's why you don't understand. You need to drop the bitterness from your heart and love people for the beauty within us all because people are good and goodness spreads like a, like an acne, acne on your back, but a good acne that spreads and unites the bacteria to find a flannel. Do you see, I hope so.

 

It's quite sophisticated dark art if you could do it every day?

 

My days in San Francisco while living in Colma rarely found me without a leather bound goals diary and a pen. The vast majority of my most impressive writings have come from watching people, serving people, and immersing myself intentionally outside of my cultural norms. There is without question in my opinion no substitute for immersion in direct conjunction with the imagination. Vivid imaginations alone are impressive artistic machines, but they are nothing without the real world saturation and clarity afforded by our own five senses. One can imagine most anything, except for when "You just cant make this shit up" happens. That my friend is when immersion becomes necessity lest you rob yourself of an opportunity to articulate in your own special way, an irreplaceable moment of shock, awe, or human/circumstantial excellence. Cheers!

 

Yeah, some people are good, but bad writing is bad writing and that was bad writing. Even if the story was absolutely true in every particular, the writer made it sound like a pack of trite clichés and lies.

 

Nnn,

 

I agree with Privateer -- we're here to discuss and share writing, not truth per se.

 

This is an interesting conversation.
Reality is a very vague thing and each of us has their own. You can have a rich inner world of feelings and experiences inside your head, even if you lack real-life experiences others have. Going out there might make stories easier to enrich, but I don't think it's necessary. When one explores the world and writes about it, another may have enough juice to pull a trilogy as a shut-in. I believe that all we need is two basic ingredients: a pinch of feeling, and a pinch of inspiration. Everything else can be found. That's why we have our imagination - and google! It all depends on what you want.

 

True, you gotta swing an axe before you can write about lumberjacks.

 

You need to swing an axe to write about being a lumberjack, probably; but you don't necessarily need to do so to write about them, or to have one as a character, though maybe as an MC.

 

There are some things we write about that we can never experience. I'm currently setting up to write a type of Greek tragedy based off of a Greek myth (that's a tragedy). No matter how much research I do, I won't know what it's like to wander the streets of Athens or dip into the waters outside Ithaca. Even using my personal beach experiences, I can still only guess.

I often write male characters as my main leads as well and I can't ever know the full experience of being a natal male.

While going out into the world can be beneficial, I don't think it's absolutely necessary and that people who're shut-ins can write beautiful stories just as well as those that aren't.

However, I'm biased. I love to explore, but I spend most of my time indoors and prefer it that way. I don't have any significant relationships outside of being my parents' kid and my primary companions are dogs and chickens. I still think I can write decently.

Edit:
Also, the story in the original post made me roll my eyes. I like my feel-good stories to be more realistic.

 

I'm not much of an explorer, nor much of a socialiser. Those who know me call me a chatterbox, but online I tend to be more reserved. Ok, maybe not, I make massive walls of text sometimes, but that's clearly different from making speeches regularly in conversation. That was two adverbs I just used...anyway.

Because of this disposition, I'm often told I'm missing out on the world. And I get that. Yes, I miss the occasional sight. I don't have a massive collection of experiences in different places. But I'm still alive. I can perceive a lot of different perspectives. And perhaps it is the most distorted yet rational that make up what I consider my best ideas.

I tend to write about the fantastical, speculative or insane simply because I know they won't happen in reality, at least not in my lifetime in all likelihood. I write about not what I think is right or wrong, but what I think others could see as such, deranged or misguided as they may be. I like to make my own worlds, because to me, the most interesting stories are ones that can't happen here. Let others who are more interested write about that. Me, I wish to write about something different.

But for sake of discussion, what experience do I have? The experience of being bullied, of course. I used to take everything literally, lack in physical strength and running speed, and anger quickly. I was also arrogant and intelligent and had like one friend. This made me an easy target for roving packs of nuisances, and it would often grow violent. I even considered it a kind of war in my head, using sticks as weapons. I know how it feels to be isolated. To watch your few friends slowly vanish, joining those they know better and abandoning you entirely.

That's about all I can say right now in terms of experience that's poignant to me. Honestly, something as simple as the sunset is poignant to me in a way. But yeah, that's my main experience I suppose. As I said, I like to write about that which I can't experience. Except for one thing- I do experience, it. The writing itself is the way to do so.

 

On my brief set of life experiences, I have arrived to the thesis of that opposite is more truthful. People who develops any sort of activity have less proclivity to understand as a whole what are they doing and why, than people which observes them performing such activities. For that, the less efficient way that a writer could perform to understand an activity, unless it´s about gathering a set of technical specific components and know-how (as a way of a manual or set of instructions), is to perform such activity, specially if writing anything more than about the activity by itself. To know about an activity can' t be satisfied with only perform it, and, usually, the one who observes from adequate distance can get a better perspective, and hypothesize in consequence.

 

Actually, the story is basically true:

https://www.nbcnews.com/dateline/story-behind-viral-story-man-s-act-charity-utah-denny-n554246

 

It's interesting to me, the swing this thread took for a while, focused more on vetting the truth of the writing. Literalism. I perfectly understand wanting truth in stories meant to be engaged as data-delivery systems of factual occurrences, but when literalism propagates out into the rest of creative writing, it begins to reek of the kind of literature that some Minister of Literary Works would either approve or reject for the good of the proletariat and the furtherance of The Party.