Framing Experiences
Oral tradition, the mother of the culture that surrounds creative writing, began with the tribal leader returning to camp, brimming with excitement and animation as he told his fellow tribesmen every nail-biting detail of the adventure that culminated in a campfire feast. It’s hard to deny yourself, as a writer, the scope of your experiences when relating a set of events and telling stories in the third person; we really are just pretending to be the omniscience we think exists, assuming that persona as we try to peal out of the characters we build. To really take a step back, or to manipulate an imaginative reality in the hopes that you as the author can make your presence vanish from the story, is the goal of many writers who seek therapeutic benefits in literature and creation. If history has taught us anything, it’s that man is constantly seeking self-improvement in all facets of life, and when the prospect of something more clear-cut or convincing in this life becomes clear, we’re not entirely afraid of abandoning our past ignorance for the new. The interesting thing that does stick with us, and that defines the jagged path of history itself, is that we never really lose the feeling or the experience of the past- some elements of the ignorant psyche we used to reside in actually remain, and begin to define us in our own actions. Looking back as bored history students, of course, we can see the problems with the righteousness of the human mindset; every day new studies shake little truths in our world, and scientific rules seem as transient as fads with the rapid development of technology and the stumbling-upons that give us cures for previously incurable diseases.
Still, our ancestors in thought may have been onto something with that Enlightenment that led us to our boundless tanks of wisdom today. For the first time in history we saw people acknowledging the ignorance and maybe arrogance of society, an aberration in the clear-cut line of thinking that defined experience in the Old World. Accumulation of knowledge is experience, finally- something that accounts for the weird meanderings and perfectly unique plots of our stories. The Enlightenment writer John Locke had himself something to say on the topic of experience; “we are like chameleons, we take our hue and the color of our moral character, from those who are around us”. What now looks like stating the obvious is the essence of revelation, and in a way it really shows us how far we’ve come. At the same time, writers seek far too often to discover more intellectually and define their experiences using this “heightened world-view”. And of course, in the spirit of argument we can have a long row about which of these should come first- the chicken or the egg- but to many the answer seems clear.
How many times have you done this in a high school English class- that is, to craft a finely-tuned answer to any thematic question, making sure to be thorough and mentally marking off each word in the vocabulary list of the week, incorporating every rhetorical device under the sun, for the sake of sounding intellectual? Of course, no one can really know what your thoughts are, and the most bewildering of answers can easily pass for an imperceptibly higher level of intellect in the thinker. But really, even in earnest, we’re cheating ourselves if we think that that is the authenticity associated with personal experience in writing.
Who are you? How can you ever claim to have an answer to that question without experience? How can you claim that with experiences? What’s kind of exciting about creative writing is the fact that nobody really knows anything enough to truly be an expert on it- but we can very well pretend to be, what with our rhetorical devices and big words, the ultra-enlargement of our brains. If you’re an expert in creative writing, you’re not really in the game. If you claim to have experienced life, then you should know what I know and what others who have experienced anything truly know; that the experiences in life are tickets to the big game. Are we players or are we spectators? Some like to think we are the players, and some like to acknowledge their experiences of watching life through a pair of eyes.
Experience is a tool of humility in us all, writers or not. I like to think that rather than trying to draw meaning out of our experiences, we draw experience out of our perception of meaning. This, this spirit of thought that defines us from each other, is why everyone should write or speak or share with everyone else. Talk more about your experiences, less about why they define you. Express every detail you imprinted in your mind; what color the sky was, the feeling of the breeze, the pulsing of your heart at that exact moment. Your story will always be unique, like glass reflecting any combination of colors on its screen, any wavelength of light hitting your eyes. Make it a point to give experience to others, and give others the choice to watch your thoughts spread or to think themselves.
