Do Not Underestimate Life Experience

I have been an instructor all told for about 16 years now. What I mean by an instructor is one who, again and again, stands before and among young and/or adult learners and attempts to get everyone to a desired learning outcome.

Like many people who do this work, I have had the opportunity to sample a wide variety of student writing in addition to the innumerable books, articles, newspapers, peer-workshop pieces, websites, email, memos, foreign language materials, billboards, cereal boxes, etc.

I have come to a not-so-new conclusion but one worth supporting. While natural ability and instruction can certainly help a writer with her or his craft and storytelling, it is life experience, rich and varied, which perhaps makes the single largest difference.

Granted if there is no natural ability or a lack of instruction, formal or no, than experience alone will not a writer make. However, I have seen the enriching impact of life-exposure on writing, the thickening and layering within the story.

Perhaps a teen who has traveled widely or the middle-aged survivor of hardship. The words of a man who lost his soulmate to cancer in the early years of a marriage or another who lost his daughter. Someone who decides to study in India rather than Indiana (before I get blazed with emails, I'm sure Indiana is fascinating, I just liked how it went with India- take it easy). Perhaps a young woman who grew up following the Dead, perhaps more quickly than she had planned. Or a woman attractive enough to model who did not know she was because she grew up hidden among the beautiful thoroughbreds her mother raised. A small-town Canadian living for more than a decade in Beirut. A woman who sipped life through a straw leading up to her lung transplant and what it was like to surface afterward. A man who detailed the tragedy and post-trauma healing of sexual abuse. A woman who goes on a search through houses of God after beating cancer. A man who traveled to Thailand to experience the village and find the religion of his mother and continued the search for himself in a sea kayak paddled to Alaska. I have been moved by enough of them to know the examples seem endless.

It can be argued that some of this exposure can come from books, other media, or even oral tradition, but I believe because the sensory-stimulation isn't as rich, the benefit isn't a profound. I also don't wish hardship or tragedy on anyone. Still, getting out and tasting more of life and the world with ears and eyes open and mouth shut seems to provide the best return-on-investment for a writer's writing.