Been There, Done That: The Value of Experience

So, this thread is spun off of here, and since we wandered rather far afield of the OP's original question I thought the subject deserved its own thread.

So how valuable is personal experience in writing?

I'll start with an example that covers both angles; how William Gibson came up with cyberspace. DISCLAIMER

Now, Gibson is not and never was a computer expert. He wrote Neuromancer on a typewriter and had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the Internet age (though he apparently loves it now). He was more of a displaced hippie than a technophile...which may explain the dystopian nature of his writing when it came to technology.

But I digress. Gibson's original inspiration for cyberspace came not from technical knowledge but from observing children in video arcades. He saw the behavior - the hunched over posture, the atavistic sense/response button-mashing, the complete lack of emotion - in the best players, and from that he spun visions of a vast computer network...that did very much resemble a video game, when you stop to think about it.

That metaphor permeates a good deal of Gibson's vision of the "console cowboy"; the dependence on hand-eye coordination (this was covered in Count Zero, with the hacker Ramirez) the slang they used ("punch deck", anyone?) and the descriptions he used ("fingers moving across the keys of the Ono-Sendai").

Now, much of what Gibson wrote has become obsolete in the modern time; one of the creepiest moments in Neuromancer (a bit where Wintermute makes a series of pay-phones ring in time to Case walking past them) would seem all-but-incomprehensible to a modern reader...anyone under the age of 20 might well wonder what the fuck a "pay phone" is. *

But other things are eerily prescient. For example, the universal disdain among hackers for "the meat" (e.g. the desires of the body; food, sex, emotional closeness) and their generally antisocial behavior (Henry Case is kind of a dick to everyone, in the same emotionally retarded ways one can easily observe on the modern real-world Internet)...these are things that could, and did, come to pass...despite being written about 30 years ago.

All of this came to be because Gibson took it into his head to wander into video arcades and watch what was going on. He was writing about a dystopian future, so he took a look at the directions youth culture was going and drew inspiration from that. I will also point out; at the time Gibson was doing this (the early 80s) everyone predicted video games to be a cul-de-sac technology, something that was a flash in the pan *

And in the process, he shaped our vision of what virtual reality, the Internet and computing ought to look like.

Anyhow...

What value does personal experience have, and how do we as writers assimilate it into our story-crafting? How much license do we give our own imaginations?

My posit: Personal experiences are the mulch from which stories grow. We as storytellers must take in as much as possible, and from all this raw material do we craft real, believable tales. Watch the world around you with the mind of a child, and all things become possible.

Anyhow, let's discuss.

edited 11th Jun '12 8:37:38 PM by drunkscriblerian

I'm going to repeat my last post from that other thread:

Well, you certainly can use it. I just don't think that making it a primary aspect of your story without some form of personal experience is the wisest course.

If it's that important, learn all you can learn about it. And that includes getting as close to the source as is practically feasible.

But what I was arguing against had nothing to do with 'importance' - there seemed to be a position in the other thread that one literally can't write about things they have no personal experience with. Certainly I would agree that, say, you shouldn't write erotica if you've never had sex, but there's a lot of difference between that and the people who were implying that you cannot write a story featuring guns in any capacity if you've never fired one. That's what I'm opposing, not the importance of personal experience in general.

I tend to think that personal experience is for writing gritty technical details of something, but not at all necessary for a more broad story telling situation. You don't need to have lead armies to write about a war but you should probably look into researching the subject so you don't look totally crazy.

One of the things that personal experience, in my opinion, allows is:

• As I said, gritty technical details. For instance, if you're a cryptologist, you can get into gritty details of cybersecurity subjects that barely a thousandth of a percent of the population know a damn thing about (but certainly a lot more than that talk about how to do cybersecurity sadly). Otherwise, if you try to give technical details without having intimate knowledge, you're likely to just get everything wrong.
• To be more expansive or go beyond the usual for a particular subject. For instance, if you're very knowledge about government systems, you can explore and be more wacky with them and know whether it would work or not. When you don't know much about a subject, you tend to take the "wiki" version of it, and many times people who have this limited knowledge who see some outlandish thing call it "implausible" or "impossible" or down-right stupid, only to find out it actually happened in real life and the expert was correct in detailing it out.

But the vast majority of story telling is either about a particular conflict, about character development or about a certain theme (or some combination thereof) and thus the gritty details, even if wrong, aren't that important.

Also I would like to point out that hackers are not always anti-social and that is not actually considered the norm.

Then I guess we're on the same page. Certainly a writer can have a character fire a gun in one of their stories even if they-the-writer have never done that. But if guns and the firing of them are going to be important/central to the story (like in, say, military fiction), that writer owes it to his readership to do some research...and that could and should include going to the range and capping off a few rounds.

edited 11th Jun '12 8:56:55 PM by drunkscriblerian

My view in a nutshell.

And it also sums up the other thing I was having problems with in that thread, incidentally - the insistence on firsthand knowledge as necessary and seeming dismissal over any other kind of research.

I don't think that other forms of research have no value...every writer worth his word processor does that stuff, and anyone saying that it has no value at all is an idiot. But getting as close to the source as you can also has merit, and I do see a lot of dismissal of such on this site...and to be frank, that worries me.

Writing is like nutrition; you need a balanced diet to be healthy. Research, interviews, firsthand knowledge. Respect the creative pyramid, yo.

experience is useful because it is the best way to do research.

so if you think about that, then experience = did the research, and if you are proficient enough in it, up to eleven too.

Someone who is a musician would have more raw material that he knows to play with, so would have more interesting things to make a plot with, including band drama and sterio types, as well as real issues such as how record companies screw over musicians, the death of music and the arts in schools, or maybe really cool guitar designs for a cheezy super hero

this does not make someone a good writer though. A good writer can make things interesting, and a very very talented writer can take any random thing, throw it together, and make it interesting

Such as someone taking an intentionally ignorant view of history, and presenting it as a horrible action movie with atrocious inaccuracies, that sold itself as a serious movie, only to have the inaccuracies later to be revealed as a clever and utterly hilarious joke, to go with the hamtastic over the top acting that hints at it.

So, it is more raw material, but not a guarantee of talent.

edited 11th Jun '12 10:28:08 PM by i3ear

I think it's possible to write excellent fiction about things you might not have experience with, but to compensate you'd have to do research and use your imagination to fill in the blanks. Writing from experience, I think, is easier.

I think people take in more experience than they realize, which is why some might balk at the idea of needing experience to write. By nature, by the time you sit down after high school or college or whenever to type, you are chock full of a lot of experiences to already simulate a world, even if it might be lacking in detail. And entertainment is part of that.

I know this guy in real life, utterly convinced that's not true, citing the only time he's used past experiences is when he rewrote some Arthur of Camelot stories, or something to that extent, and that everything else he's created in the confines of his own mind. I sometimes wonder if that's true or not, since he's an incredibly smart guy.

edited 12th Jun '12 8:06:58 AM by MrAHR

@AHR: Story-crafters need to take in the world with the heart of a child and the mind of a grandparent.

Sounds like my opinion.

That reminds me sometime I want to learn sword fighting. Unfortunately I don't have the have the time or the energy to do so right now. Trying to keep myself sane.

Edit: Removed extra verbs.

edited 13th Jun '12 2:25:52 PM by EldritchBlueRose