What Happens in Your Life that You Can’t Write About?

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If you really think about it, the answer is, nothing much.

There may be things that you are embarrassed to write about. Things you find gross, or unpleasant, but they are all a part of life.

I’m not a big fan of “Catcher in The Rye”. It chronicled some very real, very human situations, and more importantly (if I can say it thus) social attitudes. I despised Holden Caufield, and perhaps that is a good thing. Why? Probably because Salinger made the character so abrasively real that I could despise him. Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that the book wasn’t good, or especially telling of its time. I don’t mean that at all. But it does speak to the point that there is little in life that you cannot write about.

More than once Stephen King has written about a writer sitting on the toilet and thinking that a writer would never write such a thing. Imagine that.

Just because something isn’t typically done, it does not stand that such a thing cannot be done.

Life is a mill for writers, or at least it should be in its every glorious and gory detail. What you write today could well outlast centuries, and could just as well instruct future societies what it was like to be here, to be now, and to be you.

The person who calls him- or herself a writer and in the same breath says they have nothing to write about is not paying attention.

Robert A. Heinlein once said that if you can’t sketch what you see, you’re not seeing it. I think the same thing is true for writers. If you cannot write what is happening in your life, perhaps you aren’t living it.

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