I've been poring over these replies and your answers for ages, what an amazing experience. This particular post really got me though, because I've often wondered the same thing often. Typically I think writers tend to focus on personal experiences which will drag their work out of the mediocre that makes up most of life, the defining, of…
I've been poring over these replies and your answers for ages, what an amazing experience. This particular post really got me though, because I've often wondered the same thing often. Typically I think writers tend to focus on personal experiences which will drag their work out of the mediocre that makes up most of life, the defining, often traumatising moments that make us "us". But I've found more often than not, while we can draw on those moments to give our work depth, plunging in the deep end and trying to describe them realistically, naturally - i.e. without any conceptualising or fictional distance - never does those experiences much justice.
One example I have personally, has been trying to write about staying overnight in a hospice. My Mum was passing away, and I decided to stay in the chair by her bedside. There were six terminally ill patients in the same ward, which was so quiet and peaceful in the early hours after midnight. "Using" it as a scene per se, I always quickly feels cheapening, like I'm exploiting what's too obviously emotional, or like it's a set-piece without a story. But... thinking deeper about the experience, I know that in other work I'm happy with that deals with death in one form or another, that experience in the hospice has given those other - less direct, less obviously connected - scenes an emotional illumination they'd otherwise lack.
This reminds me also of a great lecture I heard the screenwriter and director Paul Schrader give (it's on YouTube), about how he gets students to start out by listing their pivotal experiences, then asks them to use find a metaphor for that experience, which will be the starting premise of their script. I.e Schrader's overwhelming loneliness became a taxi, becoming Taxi Driver. Schrader's feeling of not being able to express love, turned into American Gigolo! Essentially, his method is about finding a useful distance between the actual event/feeling/experience and the dramatic, fictionalised action. But having the emotional foundation gives the work its power, whether it's about taxi drivers, blue collar workers in a car factory, male escorts or... cat people (I'm not sure what the metaphor was for that one, yet.)
To have a character sitting in a chair in hospice would be a great starting point for a story, you could have a character sitting there, remembering things from childhood, for example.
I've been poring over these replies and your answers for ages, what an amazing experience. This particular post really got me though, because I've often wondered the same thing often. Typically I think writers tend to focus on personal experiences which will drag their work out of the mediocre that makes up most of life, the defining, often traumatising moments that make us "us". But I've found more often than not, while we can draw on those moments to give our work depth, plunging in the deep end and trying to describe them realistically, naturally - i.e. without any conceptualising or fictional distance - never does those experiences much justice.
One example I have personally, has been trying to write about staying overnight in a hospice. My Mum was passing away, and I decided to stay in the chair by her bedside. There were six terminally ill patients in the same ward, which was so quiet and peaceful in the early hours after midnight. "Using" it as a scene per se, I always quickly feels cheapening, like I'm exploiting what's too obviously emotional, or like it's a set-piece without a story. But... thinking deeper about the experience, I know that in other work I'm happy with that deals with death in one form or another, that experience in the hospice has given those other - less direct, less obviously connected - scenes an emotional illumination they'd otherwise lack.
This reminds me also of a great lecture I heard the screenwriter and director Paul Schrader give (it's on YouTube), about how he gets students to start out by listing their pivotal experiences, then asks them to use find a metaphor for that experience, which will be the starting premise of their script. I.e Schrader's overwhelming loneliness became a taxi, becoming Taxi Driver. Schrader's feeling of not being able to express love, turned into American Gigolo! Essentially, his method is about finding a useful distance between the actual event/feeling/experience and the dramatic, fictionalised action. But having the emotional foundation gives the work its power, whether it's about taxi drivers, blue collar workers in a car factory, male escorts or... cat people (I'm not sure what the metaphor was for that one, yet.)
To have a character sitting in a chair in hospice would be a great starting point for a story, you could have a character sitting there, remembering things from childhood, for example.