Experience

I was helping my parents with yardwork the other day when my father told me - yet again - that what we were doing was something I needed to write about. "This is definitely an experience," I said. "You don't know what an experience is yet," he told me. I wanted to argue, but as I thought about it, he's right. I'm only 22 years old, the most exciting things that have happened to me are a couple of school trips overseas. In his lifetime he's been married twice, gone through multiple jobs, raised three kids, lost his parents ... in comparison, my life is uneventful.

Many non-fictionists write about things they've done or places they've been, like the examples in Robert Root's book (The Nonfictionist's Guide: On Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction) about the seafarer in Antarctica or seeing someone ready a copy of his novel on the subway. Root himself talked about all the writing he did while on a writer's wilderness retreat. I'm an average college student with a limited disposable income. I can't afford to go on excursions just to stimulate my writing. How can I compete with authors taking a year to go to Madrid or some other exotic destination and write about their observations?

But even as I say that I am reminded of Garrison Keillor's article in a recent issue of National Geographic. It was beautifully written and engaging, and was about county fairs of all things. If you're a good enough writer you can make anything exciting. Maybe if I tried I could even make my summer doing nothing exciting. I could talk about the fresh vegetables we char on the grill for dinner, the young deer flicking their tails in the backyard as they lick the salt block, or the sun beating down as we watch my niece's t-ball game. I can't imagine there is a lot of people who would want to read about all that, though.