Writing as 'Lived Experience'
Is this what writing - as well as reading - is actually all about?
Whether or not they are forms of wish-fulfilment, dreams are fascinating aren’t they? My own often stimulate one of three responses: the basis for a new piece of fiction; a new plot-point for an existing one; or an idea for something new about which to write. This present post is an example of the latter.
A few nights ago I had a vivid dream which was - for a very brief moment - incredibly ‘real’. Although, unlike in the dream, I have never had those exact conversations, played that specific game, nor crawled through a narrow tunnel on my stomach (you don’t want to know!), in my dream-state it felt as if I was truly doing those things.
Which got me to thinking about how close to being some form of tangible (if unconscious) ‘lived experience’ dreams are - and from there, to make the short leap to ask a similar question about writing.
When we write fiction we are asking our readers to suspend belief and assume that what they are reading is ‘real’. If you like, replace ‘dream’ with ‘words on a page’. Perhaps the best novels and stories are those which absorb us in such a way that we come to assume that the characters and events with which we are presented - Elizabeth Bennett or Oliver Twist, or Narnia even - were/are actually real people and places, and in reading about them we are transported, being given a ring-side seat at their ‘lived experience’.
But what about the process of writing?
Sometimes, when the muse is kind, I can get so wrapped up in the story I am drafting that words simply flood out, gallop to the page. Not an uncommon experience, I’m sure. Over a thousand words an hour is no problem. Not only that, there always comes a point when I’m writing a novel - usually about 75% of the way through - when I know I am going to finish the book; having invested so much in the characters, I owe it to them to complete their stories. I almost become ‘a reader’ rather than ‘a writer’. That is a magic moment!
Under such circumstances, might the writing process itself - on one nebulous level or another - also be a kind of surrogate ‘lived experience’? Not unlike in a dream, when we have a character walk through a door, drink coffee, miss a bus, is there a sense that through our writing we are having that experience too?
Because I think we have to be.
I believe all fiction is autobiographical in the sense that the walking through the door, drinking coffee, missing the bus etc. can only be based upon things we have directly experienced ourselves or have witnessed in one way or another. We are transferring one tangible experience into another, albeit fictional, one.
I couldn’t write about childbirth with any great authenticity (in the sense of the associated pain and emotions and woman goes through) because I haven’t had them; but I could make a decent fist of it based on what I have witnessed. Similarly, fantastical characters and events in futuristic or dystopian worlds will be based - can only be based - on what we know. Orwell’s 1984 or Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale are stories based on how people are now, but with those people - and their behaviours, emotions etc. - located into a realistic future world. They have no other frame of reference. More radical sci-fi landscapes may be imagined, but their roots will be found in what their creators have experienced in terms of real hills, mountains, rivers and lakes - or what they have seen on Star Trek, or Forbidden Planet, or Doctor Who…
I think there is a whole theory here about the role of autobiography in fiction that I need to work up..!
But to return to my theme…
If the premise is that fiction - both in its creation and then in its reading - is in some sense a translation of ‘lived experience’, does the same hold true for other genres?
I would say ‘yes’.
The playwright, although depicting their stories through a different medium, is also trying to attach the reader/viewer to the ‘lived experience’ - but in a much more physical and immediate sense. Elizabeth Bennett is not a character on a page but a living, breathing individual standing before us; it is a person - and not inanimate text - who speaks. And in the writer’s creation of the play and the events of which it comprises, their own experience of their work is also made more direct through continual rehearsal and so forth. For actors, perhaps ‘becoming’ the character and living their lives is surely part of what makes learning lines easier: “well, they would say that, wouldn’t they?!”
A poet is, of course, usually not interested in the narrative of a story. Most often they are using subtle and indirect language (metaphor and the like) to explore an almost purely emotional response to their narrative. Indeed, poets are surely less concerned by sequential action than the non-physical reaction to those actions. Their aim is for the reader to re-live the proffered experience in a more heart-felt and less concrete way. Yet it is still an attempt to get us to share the experience; the poet is trying to show us what love/grief/joy feels like - and then have us feel it too.
Perhaps achieving such intimate responses for the novelist or playwright or poet is a measure of successfully immersing themselves in the ‘lived experience’. For the reader/viewer, the good writing which hopefully follows such an immersion suspends belief, is more likely to throw us into the action in a tangible way, or generate a profound emotional response. And if the play/story/poem doesn’t do that..?
When we are writing, if we do not get that same sense of deep engagement - if we do not ‘live’ what we are writing - then I venture to suggest that what we produce is unlikely to grip those who might read it.
If we do not believe in what we are trying to produce, then why should anyone else?
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Really interesting idea - thank you!
Great post. Where do ideas come from? I had a most vivid dream years ago that still sends shivers of joy through me. Absolutely magical. I wrote a poem about it. I couldn’t imagine not.