To write well; first, experience.
On living, for the sake of your writing
Epistemic Status: Based on ‘vibes’ not science.
Over the past two months of writing every day, I have grokked the advice I have so often heard from writers, that you must experience life, to be able to write well.
I doubt I’ll be able to instill this idea into your head, in a way that the writers I admire were unable to do for me; with their flowing words and exemplary prose. But, I will still give it a go.
What you write, does not come from nothing.
Your outputs, are determined by your inputs.
In other words: you are what you eat; or, your writing is. When you eat a lot of Stephen King, you will fall into the habit of long overblown descriptions of characters, that most writers would leave on the cutting room floor. If you read a lot of Exurb1a, you’ll be using airy words, interspersed with random shit, that makes yo writing less pretensions… so, ya. ya.
Reading a lot, is essential - IMO - to becoming a better writer. Carry a book with you all the time, it’s worth it. But! If you are only gaining inspiration for your writing from other written work, you risk model collapse.
Model collapse, is the theory that AIs, trained on other AIs outputs, will spiral down and down, into a state of total sloppage. I claim the same thing happens to humans -like me- who spend more time reading, than experiencing life.
To write well, you must write in your own voice, about the things you actually viscerally understand (grok). Mimicking another person is fine, copying is good practice. But you are not the person you are copying. Trying to squeeze your butt into your favorite writer’s seat grove, if done for too long, will only force you to contort your body in an uncomfortable way. You are trying to write from a perspective you will never have. Your favorite writer, your ‘writing crush’, was writing from their own life perspective. They pulled shit from their day-to-day, and used it as foundations for their manuscript. You must do the same.
You must go out, and actually live your life.
The writing that I am most proud of, fiction or non-fiction, always links directly to reality. If it is fiction, then I am writing my own emotions and experience into the character, I take the indignation from slights against me, desire I feel towards the people I admire, and small hurts we as humans experience all day, and I use them as a fuel for writing.
When it is non-fiction, I have conversations; I argue with people I respect, or, on occasion, really disrespect; and the arguments I make to them, clean my own thinking. My interlocutor points to the flaws in my arguments, or I point to the flaws in theirs; the flaw are the most interesting.
Sometimes, I have a conversation with someone, and later think of all the things I could have said to them. This again, is some of my best writing. It provides a type of creative constraint, that forces me to speak as if to a person, instead of speaking to a .txt file. If you are struggling to write now, think of a conversation you had with someone you were trying to impress, what topic could you have brought up, that would have been easy for you to talk about, and impressed them?
A basic rule of thumb:
Pull fun words, quotes, and overarching structure from other books; the rest comes from living.
Or put another way: write what you see.
Or: Write the obvious.
I think writing about your life, also makes you a better writer. The best books I have read, put me into the mind of a character, or scholar, or journalist. They cause me to empathize with whatever they are feeling. Maybe that is the conflict they feel between their western values, and the values of the people they are studying; or the feeling of indignation and shock, when a person makes a silly mistake in their thinking; or the love they felt, for a friend, when they saw them disappear, from a cliff, into a lake. But if you are writing a character, or explainer, and you are pulling only from books, you are writing through a proxy server.
When you write through proxy, you may not know it, but you are trying to cause an audience to empathize with your own empathy; instead of empathizing more directly with a real world experience.
Gods! This is confusing me now. I think I need a diagram to explain this:
Note. Thank you Nano Banana Pro for this image.
If you are reading this, because you are stuck, and don’t know what to write. Then I am giving you permission to call a friend, and talk to them. Or, go and find an old person, and just start their motor; they’ll give you so much to write about, that your head’ll start spinning.
If you can’t write from what you see; if conversations don’t inspire you; perhaps you are a different type of writer, to the type of writer I am; or, maybe it’s a skill issue. Either way, it’s worth a try. Go live. See if you can’t grok this advice for yourself, finally.
There is someone waiting at the bus stop, and they are waiting, not for the bus. But for you to strike up a conversation.
