Personal Experience 101: The Key to Writing

Are you stuck again with writer’s block, staring at a blank sheet of paper or an empty, blinking laptop screen? Good news! The solution is so obvious.

Use your personal experiences. Write about what you know, what you’ve lived.

This tact is ideal for getting inspired to finish your poem or short story.

Two great examples of writers who write from personal experience are James Baldwin, novelist and essayist, and Susie H. Baxter, Florida memoirist.

Both have produced some masterful literature, utilizing their life experiences. I’ve learned some valuable lessons from them, specifically the importance of each person’s history on this earth.

From Baldwin, I learned to be disciplined and focused in my writing. As a youth in Harlem, James Baldwin was a loner who found little encouragement from those around him, except in the pages of books. In Go Tell it on The Mountain, for example, he detailed the struggles of his religious faith, street violence, and lack of opportunity for Blacks. Still, he never gave up on writing.

I, too, was a loner and book nerd as a teenager, living in the town of Pelham, Georgia. But, gradually, like Baldwin, I also was inspired to try writing like my favorite storytellers. So, after my first few literary attempts, I learned to write about what I knew and stopped imitating literary giants such as John Updike and James Baldwin.

Another gifted writer is Susie H. Baxter, Florida memoirist, who does an excellent job chronicling her family history. Baxter is one of three daughters of a tobacco-farming family back in the 1940s. Times were hard, and farmers depended on good weather for bountiful crops. Baxter and her family worked from early morning to evening. However, she and her two sisters completed their schooling and found jobs in the city. Baxter would marry, relocate to Gainesville, and start her writing career.

As a Southern writer, I feel a kinship to Baxter since my father’s family were sharecroppers in Georgia. They gradually migrated to urban regions. My father, however, moved nearby to Pelham, Georgia, where he met my mother and raised a family of nine children. During summers, my older siblings and I did fieldwork to earn spending money.

Hard work!

To be sure, writing is hard work, demanding discipline, good research skills, and the support of other writers, as I have found through the Writers Alliance of Gainesville.

Regardless of our social or ethnic background, each individual has unique personal experiences to chronicle. Some have more adventuresome experiences, true, but one should never be discouraged as a creative person. Remember you are writing for self-expression, to leave a record for your descendants, and to enrich others’ lives.

For further reading, research, or inspiration, I recommend Baldwin’s autobiographical novel, Go Tell It On The Mountain, as well as his book of essays, The Fire Next Time. Baldwin wrote other novels, many deemed controversial at the time.

As for Baxter, I highly recommend all four of her books, including her latest memoir, I, Susanette…, which I had the privilege of reviewing as a beta reader. I encourage others to serve as beta readers.*

Pumping Sunshine: A Memoir of My Rural Childhood

Write Your Memoir: One Story at a Time

C. G. and Ethel: A Family History

I, Susanette …

When you mine your own life for writing material, you’ll likely never experience that blank sheet of paper nor that empty, blinking computer screen. Try it!

(*If you are interested in being a beta reader, take a look at WAG’s Beta Reader program.)