Uses and Abuses of Experience

            Writing a story can be easy if it is about your personal experience, like a memoir. You know everything that happened, you do not have to look anything up, or try anything new; just sit down and recall everything you can and put it into words. Some even write about their journey as they are having it. But as an author, why would you use all of your experienced parts of life, unless you were just going to write an autobiography? Yes, you can use your personal experiences for a character who goes through something similar to what happened to the author/yourself. Or you can change it up and add or subtract parts to make it more or less exciting. It all depends on what effect you are going for, but the problem with using experience is trying not to overdo it. You can abuse experience quickly if you are not careful.

When writing any kind of piece, you want to use experiences to help you write something more correct. One can write something completely imaginary but when doing so, one must make up everything and not just some parts, because then it will confuse the reader and they will not be sure on how this should be presented. But when you want to write something new, that maybe you have not experienced, it is best to research it or to try the part of the story you want to write. For example, you want to write a story about someone who is a daredevil. For one, you probably are not one yourself -- you might be, but not everyone is. So for the events you want the daredevil to present, you will need to go out and try some of them yourself. That way you are able to describe the feeling the character will have when they are doing these actions.

By always writing with experience, people can get bored with the same stuff all the time, because everyone has experienced school, a crush, rejection from friends, disappointment from parents…and so on, so by everyone writing almost the same stuff, no one will want to read it. Or even if you are an author and all you write is about one event that happened in your life, just with different characters and how they handled it, you will most likely lose your audience quickly.

This is the problem with experience, it can be great, and it can be terrible. You can never estimate the piece until the last word is written, so try for something different sometime; use research to write your piece instead of experience. We all need something different from time to time, so why not take the advantage that is given to us?

~Kelsey