Discovering the New

You need experiences to write compellingly. Yet having experiences naturally quells the palate. Seen this, done that. How can anything measure up?

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A Norman Mailer essay, “Birds and Lions,”  in The New Yorker back in 2002 spoke to me. He wrote of the need for writers to have experiences before they are able to write stuff worth a reader’s time. So much fiction, he wrote (I paraphrase heavily), is dull because writers young and old can’t capture and enhance the lives of bricklayers, bus drivers, bureaucrats, bullfighters, barmaids, beauticians, baseball players, ballet dancers, barbers, or babysitters because, well, they are professional writers, often with MFAs, whose excitement was mostly limited to the halls of academia and summer workshops. Plus,writing is by its nature, a solitary experience.

I think about that essay all the time. His words encourage me, a middle-aged guy with a successful career in engineering and consulting emboldened to write fiction. You accumulate experiences by living. You take risks. You deal. I had experiences worth the reading public’s time. I have lived.

Like most things in life, these accumulated experiences are a double-edged sword.

After you’ve traveled around the world, worked for 35 years, raised a family, seen hundreds of movies and televisions show episodes, read a thousand or two books and hundreds of short stories, bought hundreds of CDs and been exposed to thousands of songs and compositions, eaten in hundreds of restaurants whipping up every kind of ethnic cuisine, dealt with thousands of people in hundreds of different normal and abnormal situations, played a few musical instruments, owned six different houses (not at one time, no John McCain here), and driven nine different cars, been there, done that, what, really, is new?

What comic situation could you write about that hasn’t been beaten to death by Seth Rogen, the SNL players, and the rest of Hollywood? What scenes in a contemporary novel could impress when, lurking in the subconscious and screaming from the forefront, are a dozen images that are similar playing the mind’s movie reels?

This isn’t just a challenge in writing. It’s a challenge in reading and viewing, too. It’s a challenge in simply having a conversation. My kids plead with me not to list the bands that came before, and sound much like, the one they just suggested I might appreciate. I visibly shut down with people because I’ve had the conversation before, with them, not once, but several times.

If you are the type that likes a certain format (i.e., a genre type person), maybe this isn’t so troublesome. If you are the type, like I fashion myself, who constantly seeks to discover the new, it’s frustrating as all hell.

Your warehouse of accumulated experiences is inventory for the next writing project, but it’s also where the new enters and, usually, exits immediately, humbled and hung. When will I read a novel written in second person that can stand up to Bright Lights, Big City? Do I die before I read a western that bests Lonesome Dove? Who would tackle a novel about race relations in the deep south when To Kill a Mockingbird (book and movie) exists? I can’t write a 900 page novel, not about baseball, but about a baseball, the one hit by Bobby Thompson in the Giants-Dodgers pennant race in 1951, because Don DeLillo already did. I wouldn’t even attempt a novella about a baseball now.

Of course, writers make the old new again all the time. I don’t think I can be that kind of writer.

How to discover the new? I read differently now. I start lots of novels (lots of non-fiction too) and don’t finish. I make endless lists of new music and books. I listen to a community radio station that prides itself on keeping its distance from the tried and true (they aren’t as successful as they’d like to believe, but still better than commercial radio). I’m not sure I write differently, but I try to think about all the other people out there who have vast experiences just like me.

Mailer’s words have proven to be doubled edged. It’s not just about your experiences. It’s about exposing your experiences to the accumulated light of everyone else’s out there, then determining whether you’ve truly illuminated something that could blind someone, or not.