TAKES: Write what you know, right?
Is good storytelling only derived from personal experience?
Hey fellas.
Quick one today, about some minor discourse afloat concerning whether or not creators can tell a good story if they lack the necessary lived experience to lend authenticity to the tale*.
Those of you who know me know that it’s no mystery where I stand: Artists can do whatever they want.
On top of it, I think that any attempt to intimidate, isolate, or coerce creators out of telling their story is not only wrong, but it’s also the wrong way to handle this issue if you actually care about it. I think on this front particularly, we are a little off-course as a community — too comfortable with excusing bullying tactics in the name of some higher cause.
And that’s about as pointed as I intend to get here. Overall, I want this entry (and my place in the community) to be more about what I am for, not what I’m against.
So today I want to outline, as simply as I can, why I think creators should be able to tell stories they want to tell, even if they lack the perceived lived experience required to do so with “authenticity.”
First, there’s the obvious point that what counts as the gold standard of “lived experience” required to tell a particular story is… kind of arbitrary.
Do you need to have survived a shark attack to tell a compelling story about it?
Do you need to be a veteran to write about a war?
Do you need to fly to write Superman?
Of course not, and nobody (as far as I can tell) really believes that you do.
In most cases, we’re perfectly willing to accept that creators take liberties of imagination. Hell, even creators who check off the ideal lived experience boxes for a particular story have to write characters and situations that reflect experiences different than their own in that same story.
Under the strict essentialism of lived experience, how would they possibly be able to do that?
Instead of opening up new perspectives, lived experience starts sounding kind of… limited.
Taken to extremes, if all we expected of one another was work that only reflects our limited experience, we would have a crowded autobiography genre, and nothing else.
Let’s really think about what we mean by “lived experience.” What counts?
Can a person who has spent more time in a foreign country than an academic who has spent their entire professional life studying its history write a better book about it?
I think, naturally, you have some more questions about this scenario. What exactly is the book about? Is it historical non-fiction? A memoir? A restaurant guide?
How important are the small cultural details and personal experiences a tourist might pick up, versus the deep cultural nuances and historical influences that only an academic might understand?
Who’s the better writer?
Now, I think it is true that one’s lived experience can add interesting, even authentic, details and “flavor” to a story.
But my point is, that’s no panacea for good storytelling. It couldn’t be. It’s too narrow on its own.
Which leads me to point number two: Lived experience is only one of many tools in a writer’s toolkit. Among them, emotional intelligence. Creativity. Structure. Imagination. Turn of phrase. Factual knowledge. Insight.
You get the idea. No writer necessarily has them all, but having many on balance seems to produce good storytelling.
I can see a case for how lived experience helps add more authenticity to a story in a way that can sometimes really count. But there are other tools needed to tell a good story, too. I don’t know that I buy lived experience as having some special prominence that overrules all other considerations. Authenticity doesn’t automatically make a story good, absent everything else.
Finally, even if I’m wrong about all of this, and somehow a creator’s lived experience is something that deserves added weight in the calculus of pursuing a story, perhaps even above all other considerations, still, no one has the right to prevent you, a member of the audience, from experiencing the story and forming your own opinion.
Don’t let people make up your mind for you on these things. I may take advice from a trusted friend who knows me and my interests, but that quality of insight doesn’t typically come from your average Twitter pile-on.
Ultimately (and I’ve been hinting at it throughout), my point is this: The only metric that should matter is whether or not the story is good.
That’s the only thing that finally condemns or redeems a creator. Every one of us in the biz knows that risk. We put our stories out there anyway.
That’s courage. Tearing each other down ain’t.
How we determine whether a story is good is messy, sure. But one thing seems certain — most of us seem to be able to intuit whether or not a story has crossed that threshold.
And what happens when a story fails our good test? Here’s where things get complicated (but, I would argue, they should be complicated).
If a story fails to pass muster as “good,” you might say that this proves the critics correct, and the creator wasn’t fit to tell it.
But I’d argue that the story was still worth doing.
It was instructive, not only to the community, and to the audience, but to the creator.
The creator deserves that chance to not only reflect on how their work was received but to improve their skills for the next one.
Maybe the creator was unsuccessful, and the work would have been better suited to someone with more first-person experience, or at least someone who had done some more research.
If you really believe this, then nothing makes your case stronger than allowing that work to exist, so that we can make up our own minds about it.
Trust audiences. They’re smarter than you think.
And further, if the resulting story isn’t “good,” and you think that by dint of your lived experience, you were the one who should have told it, then, brother…
… you should tell it.
In fact, I would say you owe us that story.
More stories, and more voices. Not fewer.
If you’ve got an angle on a flawed story, put it out there. As the saying goes, “show, don’t tell.”
I think we might be a little too comfortable sometimes in the telling, and unfortunately, it seems to be preventing storytellers from taking chances that they should be taking, and creating the interesting work, even flawed interesting work, that makes for a robust and healthy storytelling ecosystem.
I’ve talked about this a lot with other creators. Largely, we’re in agreement on many of these points, with interesting and nuanced disagreements here and there.
Though for many of them, saying so publicly is a risk they’re not willing to take at this time. That chilling effect has the negative effect of limiting the discourse, and while that’s not good for many a reason, the relevant one here is that the discourse we get is not representative of what people actually think about this stuff.
I’d rather know what people think.
And that, dear reader, is why I write posts like this from time to time. So you know where I’m at.
Now, I’m not asking you to stick your neck out. Guard your opportunities and play the game for as long as you can stand it.
But I will challenge you in this way: tell the story you want to tell, no matter what anyone says.
You owe us.
*rent