February 10, 2017 - 00:08
Writing is influenced by the writer’s experiences, in form of topic, characters, plot, placement, or even subconscious influence. Everything you do affects you in some way, when you write you reveal yourself in some way on that page, and as a result you expose some of every experience you may or may not have realized you faced. It’s uncomfortable to explicitly describe personal information, and you never need to do that in order to become a good writer, but a person does need to draw upon private experience in order to write. Writing cannot be limited to only to the things that a person has experienced without any influence from anything other than them. I do not think that writing should be sharing other’s stories in the form of a nonfiction piece, where the writer literally types a transcript of a conversation, all without the speaker’s consent. However, I do believe that it is fair to write something about the experience the writer had within that conversation. In this form, on Serendip, I believe it is wrong to discuss the unapproved conversation that occur at everyone’s sites. But, on a grand scale, I believe that if anyone from the course chooses to write something that has been influenced by the experience they had at their site, or with the people from their sites, they should be able to without a sense of guilt. Should I, at this point in my life, ask every person who is introduced in my life whether it is ok if my writing is influenced by them, mentions them or introduces a character based upon them, or discusses the ideas they brought into my life? Reflect upon every short story you read, every poem, every nonfiction piece or memoir. Do you really think that the people that influenced those works were openly informed of their involvement with that work? When Neruda wrote about the woman with “breasts like white snails”, do you think he honestly spoke with her about how he was going to portray her in his poetry? Writing has to be grounded in some sort of reality, and the refusal to let certain experiences influence your writing, just because they make you feel guilty for sharing segments of a narrative that you have only experienced from another point of view, is a rejection of your ability to produce good writing. Again, I am not saying you should take credit for other’s experiences, to implement them in a way that makes it sound like the writer has had first-hand knowledge of the experiences of others, but that you should not feel guilty about writing about the experiences people have told you about from your own personal point of view.