Will your writing suffer from you not having a life?

• fantasy elements: You can gain enough of those via the fiction you consume
• emotional elements: They will be hindered if you only know of them through fiction.

I already know the implications of this. I have Asperger's Syndrome, and I don't understand or even display emotions like normal people, which is bad if a Manipulative Bastard protagonist is going to be required to make a certain plot work. I've felt almost tempted to make a 'Human Emotion for Aspies' thread, several times, in hopes that I might get some help, but it's always slipped my mind. It makes me feel almost like I'm an alien who learned all she knows about humans from psych textbooks and two or three field trips to human habitats.

But I do actually have something of a life. I'm very active in my school's marching band and academic challenge team, and I hear about and see all kinds of dynamics in action just through those two activities. But then, there's always subtle nuances or undertones to events that I may or may not pick up on, and...

Well, I certainly have one hell of a problem here.

As always, human experience is subjective. You will think differently than other people, aspie or not.

As a hyperlexic and a huge introvert (I'm one of the people you would see walking in the corner during free time at PE—and then go with the girls if they're around), I feel your pain.

I guess that's why Bryan has a version of my outlook, so I can write what I observe in life.

Say, how does acting factor into all of this? Does it help?

edited 28th Aug '11 7:11:00 PM by chihuahua0

I've been asked why I won't join drama club because of how well I can act. Sure, I can feign emotions, but that doesn't mean I'll understand nuances.

I try to steal center stage when I'm in a performance, since social attention and dramatic attention are two different creatures. But does experiencing acting helps understanding of emotions?

Acting requires even more observation of real life.

Humans require a human element in fiction in order for them to have any chance of engaging with it. Human beings are self-absorbed and shallow like that, they want only to read about themselves to some degree. It's either that or non-fiction.

Given that most fiction relates to the human experience in some way, yeah, having real life experiences is vital. The question is: How much? Not all of us can quit our jobs to go hunt dangerous game in the amazon with just a Bowie knife and a will to survive or brave warzones to ferry orphans out of the country while under fire.

This is what's going to do me in as a writer. Too much of an introvert. Too few encounters, and most of those ended badly.

edited 28th Aug '11 8:04:50 PM by MildGuy

Not all of us can quit our jobs and do shit that our characters do. But we can talk to someone who has, which is the next best thing.

Writing will suffer greatly from a writer not having a life. For one thing, intense depression. Even introverts get lonely sometimes. For another, dialogue and characterization will suffer because you won't be out there talking and listening and observing how people move and honing your social skills.

Ultimately, writing is a reflection of the writer's life, no matter how many things are tweaked. If all you do in your life is write, your work will grow stagnant, just repeating the same things over and over. That's not something you want. Good writers want to change, even if it's only to improve.

edited 28th Aug '11 8:52:49 PM by Leradny

Your writing will only suffer if you don't have the imagination to be able to imagine being in your characters situation, and/or you do half-assed job on research.

Yep. Hence, I am doomed. Doesn't help that most people I over hear talk in very boring ways.

My writing will ''not'' suffer from not having a life because I have a life.

Yes. MASSIVELY.

"Your writing will only suffer if you don't have the imagination to be able to imagine being in your characters situation, and/or you do half-assed job on research."

Au contraire, your writing will suffer if you don't understand how a character would think and feel in a given situation. This isn't a matter of imagination, it's a matter of experience.

The study of the human condition is demonstrably as an effective tool for its prediction as the actual experience of it.

Or you can pretend Ted Bundy wasn't able to get people into his car if that makes you feel better.

That's a false dichotomy. When writing from the perspective of a character, you need to be able to get inside their heads. You can study a bat's behaviour enough that you could animate a convincing model of one, but that doesn't mean you know how echolocation feels, meaning you probably couldn't describe it in a way that would convince a real bat (that somehow understood English ). And obviously, human beings are a lot more complex than bats.

Which misses my point; even people who don't experience normal emotions can mimic them so effectively as to fool the rest of us into believing them sincere when they're really, really not. This is a step beyond merely being able to describe them.

edited 29th Aug '11 2:26:01 PM by Night

The uncreativity of the people in this thread startles me. You people have absolutely no idea how capable the mind is of synthesizing.

"If you write only what you've read from books, you're only repeating what you've read!"

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUU-

Creativity does not work that way. They are both methods to the exact same function: synthesis. Some people learn from their books, other people learn from their experiences, and the resulting works will have the pros and cons associated with their constituent methods.

This is missing the point. The issue at stake is not creativity, but realism: You can think of all sorts of things, but they might not have any actual resemblance to the relevant parts of reality, and absent any real-life experience, you'd have no way to know. Yes, you can do research, but an ounce of experience is worth a pound of research and you'll get a ton of intangibles to boot (woe to the person who uses Google Maps to estimate commute times!).

OTOH, I don't really like the phrasing of the question, which to me suggests a Manic Pixie Dream Girl-style "seize the day!" invitation to go bungee jumping naked or something (ie, the idea that it isn't real life if it isn't reckless and outlandish). All life is real life and there's no reason that a crazy activity is more real than a subdued, "normal" one. Schitzo's bit about losing loved ones is also kind of disturbing.

Which again poses the mystical idea that somehow research will all have the same conclusions and real life won't.

When, if anything, it's the exact opposite; research is colored by many different biases because it's done by many people before it gets to you, where as your life will reflect your own bias and only your own bias, making it difficult or impossible to detect.

In fact trusting in your own experiences to accurately describe reality is a terrible plan for arriving at truth because humans have enough cognitive biases to make empiricism a very bad joke. Anecdotal evidence is no evidence at all before the scientific method; why should I treat it as serious here?

I'm not sure how many of us have gotten someone else to read their writing, but I know that I have written about things I haven't experienced, and I've gotten praise for the stories from people who have experienced roughly equivalent things.

But that's what you've got, isn't it? Our experience and the way that we are capable of interpreting it is dictated, for the most part, by our senses.

But to the matter at hand: I am of the opinion that some degree of interpersonal reaction behooves one who intends to write interpersonal reaction with more than a narrow degree of realism. However, there are many forms of interpersonal interaction of which firsthand experience is unnecessary or even undesirable to faithfully duplicate, though even in those circumstances a certain knowledge of the emotions detailed therein is more than preferable.

An understanding of the mechanics of such interactions, ultimately, is the key, though a sense of empathy is nice, too. Really, it's a better selling point to say that you're, you know, not a sociopath when writing a heavily emotional work...

Quite so.

edited 29th Aug '11 5:06:07 PM by JHM

Empiricism is not a joke. Without empiricism we wouldn't even have science.

And you're sure this is all from reading books on the subject, yeah?

Note also that they only have to convincingly pretend to be one person, and that individual mannerisms differ enough that pretending to be one normal person probably isn't that difficult. A writer must think like not just one person, but many.

If you want to pretend social science doesn't exist...okay go ahead?

Quite the opposite. Empiricism believes only sensation can be trusted; this a terrible argument because your cognitive biases make a mockery of it. The human mind is to a great extent not capable of truly rational behavior and trusting it to produce a result that reflects reality from raw inputs is a terrible plan. This is why science is so heavily dependent on mathematics and statistics.

How can someone who by definition does not experience something have experience on it? They can watch other people or they can read books about other people, it's all based on study.

To observe directly is to experience indirectly. Ergo...

Please do not condescend to me regarding sociology.