avatarUlf Wolf

Summary

The text emphasizes the importance of personal experience in writing compelling fiction, as it lends authenticity and engages readers.

Abstract

The article underscores the value of direct experience in crafting engaging fiction, contrasting the dryness of academic accounts with the vividness of personal narratives. It cites literary figures like Flannery O'Connor and Ernest Hemingway, who stress the importance of writing from personal knowledge to achieve truthfulness in storytelling. The text suggests that readers can discern when a writer has firsthand experience of their subject, which fosters trust and credibility. It also references John Fowles and William Sloan, who advocate for writers to step outside academic confines and draw from their own lives. The author, Wolfstuff, concludes by encouraging writers to seek out real-world experiences to inform their work, much like Rudyard Kipling's authoritative depiction of India.

Opinions

  • Reading about scholars writing about other scholars is depicted as monotonous and disconnected from real-world experience.
  • Personal accounts, such as a warrior's experience of war or a musician's interpretation of a piece, are seen as more engaging and reflective of reality.
  • Flannery O'Connor is critical of stories that lack real-world influence, suggesting a bleak future for such writing.
  • Hemingway's advice to "write about what you know and write truly" is highlighted as a guiding principle for authentic writing.
  • The idea that truthful writing is rooted in the writer's knowledge and experience of life is reinforced, suggesting that fabricated stories can still resonate with truth.
  • John Fowles believes that young writers benefit from leaving academic settings to gain real-life experiences.
  • William Sloan emphasizes that a writer's credibility comes from writing about what they know intimately.
  • S.I. Hayakawa points out the difference between actual experiences and symbolic or mediated experiences, advocating for the novelist's role in organizing real experiences into meaningful narratives.
  • Salman Rushdie's admiration for Kipling's deep understanding of India illustrates the unparalleled authority that comes from intimate knowledge of a place and its culture.
  • The author, Wolfstuff, encourages writers to seek out adventures and experiences as a foundation for their storytelling, echoing the sentiments of the literary figures mentioned.

Experience

An Element of Fiction

(Image by Author)

Reading about what white-bearded scholars in ivory towers wrote about what other and earlier white-bearded scholars in other ivory towers wrote about even earlier white-bearded scholars… you get the drift.

Unless you are indeed majoring in the history of ivory-tower-bound white-bearded scholars, you might be in for a dull ride.

Reading a warrior’s account of war, however, or an organist’s account of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D-Minor — that’s another story, and one that will most likely keep you awake.

The obvious difference is experience, and as a writer, this is a very hard and very valuable currency.

Flannery O’Connor, in her oracle mode, once observed, “I read some stories at one of the colleges not long ago — all by Southerners — but with the exception of one story, they might have all originated in some synthetic place that could have been anywhere or nowhere. These stories hadn’t been influenced by the outside world at all, only by television. It was a grim view of the future.”

Today, O’Connor’s prediction rings ten times as true.

Hemingway’s likely most famous advice to writers fits very nicely right here: “Write about what you know and write truly.”

Which brings to mind another great (anonymous) advice: “Always tell the truth, then you don’t have to keep track of your lies.”

If you have experienced what you write about, you know of what you write. This is reflected (shines through, even) in your prose: readers sense this and believe they can trust you. And a reader’s trust is something every writer should aspire for. It is gold.

Hemingway elaborates on his pithy advice above: “Good writing is true writing. If a man is making a story up it will be true in proportion to the amount of knowledge of life that he has and how conscientious he is; so that when he makes something up it is as it would truly be.”

John Fowles, one to not mince words, suggests, “I sincerely believe the best thing for a young writer to do is to get the hell off the campus and go and work it out on his own.”

William Sloan, both author and publisher, offers this experience-grown advice: “The first requirement of a writer is that he knows something. The second requirement is not remarkably different. The wise writer writes about what he knows and never about what he knows nothing.”

S.I. Hayakawa, linguist and senator, has given experience a lot of thought. Here is one of them: “The differences between actual and symbolic experiences are great — one is not scarred by watching a moving-picture [or a television] battle, nor is one nourished by watching people in a play [or on YouTube] having dinner. Furthermore, actual experiences come to us in highly disorganized fashion: meals, arguments with the landlady, visits to the doctor about one’s fallen arches, and so on…. The novelist, however, abstracts only the events relevant to his story and then organizes them into a meaningful sequence.” [my comments]

Let’s round this out with a beautiful observation by Salman Rushdie: “No other Western writer has ever known India as Kipling knew it, and it is this knowledge of place, and procedure, and detail that gives his stories their undeniable authority.”

In other words, go climb a mountain, go sail a sea.

© Wolfstuff

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Creative Writing
Author Quotes
Elements Of Fiction
Storytelling
Experience
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