Life experience(s) that have influenced your writing?

[Christine Calhoun]

Dear 6S users,

For nosiness sake spill your ever-loving guts people.

I will if you do.

Love,

Christine

[Deborah Jovan Reed]

I agree with Bill although it has been pointed out that in everything I've written there seems to be a 'me' in it. I ~ call it a niche if you will ~ have female characters suffering due to some manner of abuse and in the end finding a way out even if I kill her off. The children are strong and independent and I have a problen writing slang because I don't use it.

[Christine Calhoun]

I thought it would be fun to pick out something in particular and share it. I know that whenever I go through any kind of misfortune I can always chalk it up to experience points for writing. Plus melancholy has always been great fuel for my creative fire.  Thanks for the comments anyways :)

[Robert Crisman]

I spent 15 years in the Catholic Church, 15 years on the streets, 15 years in radical politics, and 18 years in and around recovery  from drug addiction. Pretty much everything is filtered through that.

[Kristine_ES]

right, can't add much to what those who have posted previously:  all life experience influences. 

my high school creative writing "instructor" said my stuff was "cathartic".  perhaps it was. and perhaps still is.  i wrote in response to the drama and trying to cope with things.  a lot of my poetry has been inspired by unrequited love, but that item seems to have cooled quite a bit. 

current life still inspires (did anyone else see that vibrant pink n blue sunset last night?), so i should be writing a heck of a lot more!

 

[Toby Tucker Hecht]

I write fiction where the point of view character is almost always the outsider even within the coziness of a family or a community--the one with a secret or an unfulfilled desire.  Make of this what you wish.

[Teresa]

Henry David Thoreau wrote, "When a dog runs at you, whistle for him."  When life runs at me, I write for him.  It calms me down.  And I don't want to lose the pattern.  Ursula K. Le Guin wrote, "If you see a whole thing - it seems that it's always beautiful.   Planets, lives...  But up close a world's all dirt and rocks.  And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern."  I write to keep sight of the whole.  So for me, writing is a shield and a lens.

[Darin Walker]

When I finished The Outsiders as a child, and put the book down on the bed besides me, wrung out emotionally and physically from the story, it was the first time a book had made me feel something as strong as life itself had. I could think of nothing more incredible than the idea that someone could create something that made other people experience something they never could otherwise. Every time I sit at my laptop or open up a notebook, I recall that feeling, and remember what my job is when I write. I've done nothing as potent as that book was to me, but I keep trying, and will never forget what brought me to the blank page the very first time.

[Cita]

Beautiful reply, Darin.

[Judy Thompson]

When Im writing, everything is a trigger,  when I'm not, nothing is. 

But what gets written rarely has anything to do with the current triggering experience,  it's just that that's where all the tumblers finally show the right combo at the right moment.  

  The actual experience within the poem (which can be  almost anything) usually has to percolate through a lot of layers, sometimes decades worth, before it gets ripe enough to write about...

[Toby Tucker Hecht]

I like this answer.  The end product in prose also often has nothing to do with the trigger to write.

[Teresa]

Love this response, Judy.

[Cita]

I must weigh in here.  Everything that has come before in our lives makes us who we are now.  However, if we continue to be writer-centric, we lose a huge amount of material for writing.  We must become keen, sharp, ever-present observers.  I don't have to struggle with anorexia or drug addiction or homelessness to WRITE about it if I hone my ability to observe.  Sure, it goes through my personal filter, it is expressed in my unique voice, but the beauty of writing WELL is to step outside of self and my limited experience and WRITE the global story.  Our whole existence as human beings in the big wide world should influence our writing.  For instance, I have slept beside a waterfall in the wilderness in bear country... in a canvas bedroll... no tent.  Does that influence who I am and what I write about?  Sure!  Monday morning, on my way to breakfast in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco, I stepped over some vomit on the sidewalk.  Does that influence who I am and how I write?  Sure!