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[orthent]

If your everyday life seems poor, don't blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is no poverty and no indifferent place.

--Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young PoetDear You

Comments

[walktheboat]

[orthent]

I should be clearer about what kind of a place I live in, since I still think of my hometown as a small(ish) town, although it's actually a modest-sized city (about 50,000 people). And yes, it has night life (though nothing to compare with even the state capital) and culture--though it's possible that after years of living here, what I think of as culture would make a city-dweller laugh. I'm guessing a place like our county seat (6000 people), or like the nearby towns of Roland and Slater (under 1500), is closer to most folks' idea of a small town. Probably I have no right to underplay the drawbacks of living in such a place

[indongcho]

There is this offensive argument I admit to having ranted about before: that you can't be a good writer if you live in a small town in a remote area, because a writer needs lots of experience, the more varied the better, that you can't get in a small town.

I've never understood arguments like that. Frankly, if all writers stuck to topics that they had personally experienced, fiction would be by far the poorer for it. There are simply too many things to experience, so many things that one person is never going to go through. And I wonder, how would one of those people react if I responded to their argument with, "So you think I should watch a village being massacred before writing about a character who has experienced that? Okay, I'll go look for a massacre!"

Hmph. And I won't even get started on the arguments concerning experience and writing romance and sex...I could be babbling for paragraphs on end ^^;

[orthent]

Ahaha, we've both ranted on this--in fact, I remember using some of the same arguments in your journal that I did in this post. (Sorry 'bout the copypasta!)

And I wonder, how would one of those people react if I responded to their argument with, "So you think I should watch a village being massacred before writing about a character who has experienced that? Okay, I'll go look for a massacre!"

Well now, some people would probably argue that if you haven't experienced such things, or grown up hearing the oral histories of those who have experienced them, you're at high risk of writing them badly--of glossing them over, or using them to up your story's wangst quotient without regard to how people who actually have experienced these events process the trauma and the memories, or without regard to the real-life, permanent damage the events have caused. Thus we get people who watch a 45-minute video about the Holocaust in social studies class, and think it's a good idea to write an AU fanfic set in a concentration camp for their favorite