My Unstoried Life

By Serdar Yegulalp on 2021-05-08 08:00:00-04:00 No comments

An old story I've told before, but one I revisit often: In college, when I took a writing course, the professor had a talk with one of the students that enraged me. The student was trying to come up with a story idea and was drawing blanks, and the professor started grilling them about how old they were, what their life had been like up to that point, how many times they'd moved around, etc. Eventually the prof said something to the effect of "Maybe you don't have enough life experience to write good fiction yet."

First time I heard that, the top of my head almost melted off. Over the years, I thought about it differently: Maybe he was trying to say something like, don't beat yourself up over this, live a little first, but just didn't know how to do it diplomatically. Then I realized, if there's someone in this world who needs to be able to speak diplomatically and precisely, it's a writing teacher.

If I sat down now to write my autobiography, and confined it to the external details of my life, the whole thing would not even cover one side of a piece of paper. I've not lived a storied life, and I know it. And that has always bothered me, because it left me wondering what, if anything, I had to bring to the table in my work.

Whenever others would ask me about this same quandary — how can I write big when my life's been so small? — I'd give them this advice: Look in your own life for the small things you can make big. Now I wonder if all this time I've been misleading them. Are some things only possible to write about if they've been experienced firsthand? How much does imagination and extrapolation really carry us?

Another countercharge to all this, I guess, would be that we do it anyway. We always fantasize about things we have no way of experiencing, and we are generally willing to give someone the benefit of the doubt with their fantasy as long as it's reasonably convincing. This is why some of the most disgruntled readers of some particular genre are people who have lived experience with the subject in question, because they know too much and resent the laziness of authors who don't even bother to do basic homework. This is also just coincidentally why I don't read techno-thrillers: for the most part they're garbage as fiction, and the technical side is often risible, because I Know Too Much.

Most of us are not globe-trotting adventurers. Heck, I don't even have enough going on in my daily life to bother putting on my Instagram feed most of the time. But we know a little something about life as it's lived with others, and if you pay close and deep enough attention to that, you can get a whole world out of it. What you do with that world's up to you, though.