Does 'experience' make you a better writer?

Or, "Are You Experienced?"

Everybody’s talking about “experience” lately. Is it necessary to be a good writer? Well??? IS IT?????? The guys at

Neo-Passéism

seem to think so, and

Lewis Woolston

wrote a manifesto recently that expresses much the same position, and there’s been some other people on this site saying as much who I’ve forgotten, idk, tag yourself. But just as many people are taking the opposite position.

Ross Barkan

and

John Pistelli

, for instance, think it’s overrated:

Pistelli himself continues as follows:

Here in what remains for now the “universal homogenous state” people increasingly have similar types of experiences, obviating literature’s reportorial function of publicizing new ways of life. The self-hatred of this slightly immiserated universal middle class, generally the class filling out the ranks of the writers, generates a demand like the one I saw this week for a new literature of raw experience.

Firstly: are people “increasingly” having similar types of experiences? The homogenization of the middle class is nothing new, though it’s perhaps been more thoroughly exported to places it hadn’t previously existed over the years. Frankly, I don’t know how much middle class life itself has even changed all that much insofar as the actual phenomenology is concerned—you ever read Samuel Pepys? The works of John Cheever could have still been relevant to many of his anxieties, and Pepys was writing like three hundred years earlier. And as disparities increase, the middle class isn’t expanding, it’s getting smaller, people are increasingly dissimilar to those in the middle class (and by extension dissimilar to most professional writers). I do think that “raw experience” is something that feels like it’s in short supply—“spontaneity” is missing from life, desperately missing, and I think people really feel that. It has infected every part of our lives, even the mundane parts of it. You used to be able to go to the box office and buy a ticket on a whim for a big concert that very same night, now it’s an ordeal of planning months in advance. That loss, I think, is a more pressing concern in our time for those pining for something “raw.”

Secondly: even with Pistelli’s examples noted—the aptitude of someone like Emily Dickinson, who never left her house, versus the ineptness of Napoleon, who’s own writing sucked the bag—I still disagree with him and Barkan. Experience is not overrated. It does, in fact, make you a better writer; not just in “grist,” as Barkan suggests, but in the actual writing part of it all.

There are a number of things that are qualities of good writers, though their necessity is weighted in different measure based on what kind of work you happen to be producing in either form or content, but here are a few standard ones:

• Can you introspect deeply? This does not mean you have to be “self-aware,” all of your considerations of yourself could be completely off the fucking mark, it doesn’t matter—the question is whether you can think successive and complex thoughts about your own interiority.

• How sophisticated is your theory of mind? How well can you imagine the thoughts and interiorities of people beyond yourself? Again, let’s avoid flattering good writers by conflating them with good people—this does not mean you have a great sense of affective empathy, merely that you can imagine the feelings of someone who is not yourself and imagine them deeply.¹ Actually feeling them is a matter for your couples’ counsellor.

• How articulate are you? How well can you convert feelings or ideas into words? Obviously this is itself divided into sub-categories of articulating very specific things, but being able to be articulate about just a handful of things can be enough. And can you do it without relying on clichés of language and thought?

• Do you read widely, or have you? Diverse work, challenging work, complex work, work you love, work you hate. Reading is a better teacher than a million workshops or seminars.

• Do you have a natural ear for language? Can you feel its natural rhythms and flow? This does not mean you have to write “smoothly,” it can be clanky or rough as hell, but whether you feel it and can command it will be the noticeable quality (this is perhaps the most important quality of any writer, and there has never been a good writer in human history without it… unless you’re writing something like bill jubobe).

This list is, as I said, non-exhaustive. Something which supports all of the above in their development, however, is lived experience. Experience on its own will not make you a better writer, but it can improve faculties that can make one a better writer. In fact it's probably one of the most significant fertilizers for the growth of those qualities. Of course, that doesn’t mean they’ll necessarily actually grow if you lack attention to the necessary qualities of the experience—experience is not a magic formula to automatically make a great writer, and you can have all the fertilizer in the world and not grow fuck all if you’re a just a shitty farmer. What bothers me about this debate is its all-or-nothing character typical of such online battles—Emily Dickinson didn’t have much experience, Napoleon had plenty, ipso facto experience is largely irrelevant to the equation. Can a good writer write without a depth of experience? Sure! Some good writers have done it and continue to do it, yes, but you can find writers who find ways to write through any limitation—Helen Keller couldn’t see or hear for fuck sake, I’d hardly conclude from that outlying fact that hearing and seeing are therefore completely irrelevant to the ability to write. Write through whatever handicap you want. Type with your feet but only write on muscle relaxants. Exclusively render your work through dictation but only to a person who doesn’t speak a word of your language. Write without any consonants. People have written through worse and, with enough diligence, so can you. But do not tell me as a result that they are not limitations. A lack of experience is a limitation for a writer, and, make no mistake, it is one of the most significant limitations there is.

From my experiences in observing writers in workshops and at open mics over the years, it’s pretty clear that a lack of experience has a high tendency to correlate to bad writing (more often in fiction, but in poetry too). Often this is because, as I suggested, this lack of experience can also correlate to a lack of development in the other qualities of good writers—this leads to the infamous dead-faced autofic, the styleless recitation of its dull writer’s dull experiences rendered through their dull sensibilities. And yes, there are those who triumph in spite of it all, but this has only led to something which is more of a macro problem than an individual micro one, which is an over-abundance of very competent… campus novels. At this point, a diversity of experience has become necessary simply because a growing number of readers don’t want to read any more of this shit, and the professionalization of creative writing, the reduction of creative writing to a specified career path with a degree out of high school, a graduate program, and a carbon-copy petty bourgeois existence eked out of it all is producing a lot of work culled from the same field of shallow experiences and is all part of the problem. But I have gone into that at length already before:

We do not need more iterations of Stoner or Lucky Jim—hell, we don’t even need another one of the weird ones like White Noise or The Magus. I do not care to read any more novels about professors or students or professional writers. I have plumbed their depths enough. Bring me to newer seas.

I spoke to a writer the other day who didn’t realize that people who put things in boxes in warehouses don’t generally intern to do that work. Now, I don’t know her well enough to assume her experiences are so limited—they may not be—for all I know this was just an isolated ignorance, but its expression neverless felt very prototypical of a kind of problem we find ourselves in, just how acclimatized to the professional writing life so many writers are. They simply do not know the world outside of it, and it shows. This kind of sterility of existence is what produces the desire for the raw, it is the realm of un-experience. And that cannot be good for art.

Consider this quote from John Dewey:

Theory can start with and from acknowledged works of art only when the esthetic is already compartmentalized, or only when works of art are set in a niche apart instead of being celebrations, recognized as such, of the things of ordinary experience. Even a crude experience, if authentically an experience,is more fit to give a clue to the intrinsic nature of esthetic experience than is an object already set apart from any other mode of experience. Following this clue we can discover how the work of art develops and accentuates what is characteristically valuable in things of everyday enjoyment. The art product will then be seen to issue from the latter, when the full meaning of ordinary experience is expressed, as dyes come out of coal tar products when they receive special treatment.

A series of personal anecdotes.

My paternal grandfather was the son of a drug-addled Indigenous prostitute and an Indigenous dude who got lost before my grandfather was even born. After several years as a ward of the state he got shotgun married to a woman descended from Finnish Red Army veterans. After he walked out on her, she mounted an underdog political campaign and became the mayor, eventually becoming the political mentor for one of Canada’s worst prime ministers. My maternal grandfather and his family crawled out of the smouldering ruin of post-war Italy, where they lived in a tiny village on top of a mountain and came to Canada. He married a woman who worked in the same factory as him.

My parents bought a big house at a bargain with some help from family when I was young and paid off the mortgage by effectively turning the place into a rooming house, meaning I grew up in a house filled with Japanese students, Mexican doctors, Polish illegal immigrants, Dominican vegetarian artists, sad divorced guys, etc., all mingling under one roof. I am the third of six children sired by two fathers and four mothers, and my youngest biological sister was born with a chromosome disorder which has disabled her for life. After my dad left us, my mom, my youngest sister, and I moved into her parents’ basement in a little bungalow in a very bad neighbourhood, on the same block as housing complexes that displayed near third-world conditions of poverty. I had spent my previous two years at a nice little private school filled with mostly upper-middle-class Jewish kids and then spent my high school years at one of the worst schools in the city.

My mother kicked me out of the house when I was 16 or 17 because of my unruly behaviour and drug use, and I finished high school while living at my paternal grandmother’s house and sleeping on friends’ couches. I continued to surf couches until I was twenty-one, and then moved to Montreal at the behest of a friend, where I wound up in a dilapidated house with between six to twelve other people living there at any given time. By this point I had developed a dependency on amphetamines and was deep in the pits of manic psychosis. My roommates and I variously supplemented our rent by hosting shows, running an Airbnb scam, stealing, and selling drugs. While it was mostly roommates of mine who sold drugs in this situation, I myself had done so to get by in the past, and over the years before and since I’ve done a number of things for money, including working at a print shop, selling clothes at American Apparel, drawing hentai for perverts, flipping stolen goods, working in a warehouse, jail-breaking Apple products, being a barista, being a bartender, being a waiter, being a busboy, tutoring, giving guitar lessons, stocking shelves at a grocery store, painting Warhammer figurines, being a research assistant, writing for websites, and canvassing for charity (it was a scam). Eventually I went to law school to become a lawyer (I’d nearly embarked on a career as a linguist, and there was a brief drug-fuelled period years earlier where I was very intent on becoming a Rabbi in spite of being Catholic), nearly got kicked out because of my activist work, and married a professor of English literature.

Now, did all of this make me a good writer? We can debate that. But I’ll say this much: I absolutely believe I’d be a worse writer had I spent all those years locked up in an ivory tower, had I gone from a normal childhood straight into an undergraduate creative writing program, followed by a graduate one, made all the right career moves and connections and then spent my adult life eating from the arts grant trough while going to shitty little publishing cocktail parties. I’ve gotten to reflect on myself in circumstances most professional writers never will. I’ve met and been friends with the sorts of people many professional writers will never know. I have spent time with people with ways of speaking, ways about language, that most professional writers will never hear—not intimately, anyway.

Diverse experiences help tune your ear and become the substrata of your writerly intuitions. And on some level, yes, there’s the grist too, because of course literature is still just a transformed remnant of life, metabolized and re-expressed. The “professional writer” pipeline is one which often protects you from a lot of these kinds of experiences. I’m not implying you should go out and get hooked on smack in some sort of grotesque tourism of extremity, that isn’t necessarily what we need—but what we do need is writers who have at least lived in proximity to the unvarnished, people who have been cracked open a little, or at least somewhat dented or hammered into a non-standard shape. Roll down a hill a bit until you begin to pick up some texture. That sort of thing.

But of course there’s the other thing.

Another concern that I think is in equal parts overlooked/repressed depending on which interlocutor you’re talking to, is that this whole petty bourgeois flattening of professional creative experience thing has also been a PR disaster for members of our caste. Writers used to be warriors and mystics and cranks and rapscallions and then a few years ago I saw a meme that tagged “creative writing students” with this image:

This is not good. People do not want to consume art by the kinds of writers I and the other “experientialists” in these debates are describing—nobody wants to read the works of Round SpongeBob—it makes literature seem extremely wack. If people really did want books by people like that then we would actually be very much under threat from the forces of large language models. I bet ChatGPT is a helluva lot more interesting of a “person” than [throws a dart at random at a lineup of popular contemporary writers] Miriam Toews.² Maybe this is also the real underlying logic for all those terrible “identity politics” books we on this site love to hate so much. I mean, at least “I’m Asian” is some kind of experience. A boring one on its own, yes, but something.

1. While this may seem like a feature particularly for the writing of prose, it is in fact very necessary for poetry as well, because it doesn’t just extend to “characters” but to understanding the feelings of “readers.” A lot of very bad poetry is produced by people who cannot imagine that there is actually no one in the world who would find the insight they are producing novel or interesting.

2. Funny note on this after the fact: part of the intended joke here was a lack of effort in picking an author to point to—I know next to nothing about Miriam Toews and haven’t read any of her books, the name just occurred to me. Then

Sire

tells me this morning that she was raised in a God damn Mennonite community.

Sire: [grumbles something about editorial standards and goes back to sleep]