A Good Life

There is a troubling, deeply troubling idea out there; every time I encounter it, my stomach churns a certain amount; and if it is too blatant or too subtle, it churns the worst. The idea is that the best stories are born out of the worst circumstances. Specifically, the writer's circumstances; someone said, and I don't know who and I don't want to wrongly attribute a paraphrase, that a person must have a bad life in order to be a good writer. Maybe I only hope that's not true, because I've not had a particularly bad life. But mostly I think it simply isn't true.


What I think people are trying to get at is you must be sympathetic to a situation in order to write it realistically -- on order to make the reader care. And maybe for most people, this means having gone through the situation. In America's current, individualistic age, I do not find this difficult to believe. Ask the man who just got hit between the legs with a baseball bat if 75% of the clips on America's Funniest Home Videos are quite so funny, now. We seem less and less capable, these days, of having compassion on others without experiencing first-hand what they've gone through.

But it does not mean it's impossible. I'm not saying a pampered person will find it easy to write about a pauper; but any situation, if the writer cares to, can be sunk into, contemplated, expanded until it consumes all, and come away with a very good sense of what it feels like. Will it be easier for me to imagine moderate poverty now that I've recently gone through two weeks of near certainty that I wasn't going to be able to pay certain, very important bills? Sure. Will it make it easier to imagine abject poverty? Perhaps. And there are surely other attendant emotions and situations to abject poverty that I may not realize. But will I be unable to write a "good" story with a character going through such circumstances? It may take getting to know someone who lives through, daily, what I only experienced for two weeks; but if I care about people as much as I need people to care about characters, I have no doubt it can be done.

Yes, I've had a good life. I've always been housed and fed, and I've gone to good colleges. But that doesn't shut off my capacity to imagine, or to empathize. I don't need to suffer in order to write well; I need only to love someone besides me. Try it; you might like it.

See you Friday.

If They Keep Silent: An Anthology is available on Amazon Kindle! Check it out here.