Life Experience
How do big life events shape how and what we write?
I am a parent, an experience that has changed me in many ways as a person and a writer. Today I will share two of those lessons.
Lesson One: having a child doesn’t necessarily make you a good person. Parenthood often just amplifies who you already are; the characteristics already in you. Idiots with kids can still be idiots, but now with wandering agents of chaos who reinforce their parents’ worst qualities.
This isn’t to say that parenthood can’t change someone, just that this change isn’t automatic, or uniform. Indeed, I know some men who have become worse people since becoming dads. But more on that, and how it can inform our scriptwriting choices, later.
Three Men and a Baby (1987)
Lesson two: it is time we retire the ridiculous notion that “there is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.” (Whether we are literally referring to prams, or some other big life responsibility)
Attributed to the (long dead) literary critic and writer Cyril Connolly, but more culturally pervasive than one man’s view, it is a toxic (and incorrect) belief that speaks to anachronistic views of what ambition and success should look like; indeed, what a writer should look like, talk like, be.
Stories are a reflection of life, not separate from it. To treat those experiences as obstacles to success is not only a classist, ableist and misogynistic privilege that few of us can feign to achieve, it is also the opposite of true.
In a world where every story has already been told, and with AI on our tails, what can bring to the table? Our unique experiences. That is all we have.
What big life moments have found their way into your writing? Or informed who you are as a writer, in how, when or why you write?
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