I’m at my parents’ house in Michigan, and will be here a few days more before returning to Brooklyn. Friends and people I’ve met on my month-long road trip have asked me whether I plan to write about it. It’s seems like good material, they’d say. And yes, it is, but this week I want to talk about a misconception – or rather, a misunderstanding – about writing a book; that writing a book necessitates amassing a store of extraordinary experiences upon which you can draw. I’ve talked to people who’ve said they’d love to write a book sometime in the future, but not now. I don’t know what I’d write about – they’d go on – I feel like I haven’t lived enough life. Because once you’ve lived enough life and had enough adventures, the thought goes, then you’ll finally have something interesting to write about.
Saying that you need to live enough life to write a book is like saying you need twenty million dollars to make a movie. The money enables you to make a wider set of potential movies, and the experiences enable you to write a wider set of potential books, but in neither case are the resources a requirement. Great movies have been made for less and great books have been written about less. And unlike money, you accumulate experiences by simply being a non-dead human being. By going to your day job you really don’t like that much you accumulate experiences. By sitting in a room and doing nothing you accumulate experiences. In the however many years you have been alive, you have had that many years of experiences. You have experienced wonder and glee and love and embarrassment and jealousy and frustration and betrayal and regret in varying levels. You have experienced being young and growing less young. You have felt a part of something and felt left out of something – perhaps of the same thing. Your experiences may be commonplace, but it’s their emotional core, not their circumstances, that are the raw materials of the writer.
