Why Life Experience Makes You a Better Writer

When I was in my twenties, I read somewhere that a person can only become a good writer in their 40s.

Naturally, I resented this statement immediately. For how can an old, bitter person—stuck in their ways with all the magic and positivity drained out of their system—make a better writer than a young person, full of originality (or so they’d like to believe)? One with an open mind and curiosity about life?

But now that I’m nearing the big 4-0, I am starting to see the truth in that statement.

And it’s not that you can’t write at a young age. You can, and your writing might even appeal to a certain type of audience. But good writing requires more than a sense of originality. The best writers are those who understand people, how they think, and how they react to different situations; that ability comes with time and experience.

Feeling All the Feels

We are born egoistical, egocentric little monsters. You don’t have to like it, but it’s true. Kids are mean and enjoy the suffering of others. But it’s not due to some inherently evil nature; it is due to how our brains evolve.

When we’re young, we are not capable of relating and sympathizing with others, which means that we can do things that will hurt them simply because we don’t consider or understand how they feel.

But this changes with age—we not only experience the negative consequences of our actions, but we also start to understand that those unpleasant feelings we experience are shared by all.

But while it’s easy to sympathize with something we’ve all experienced first-hand at some point—like falling off our bikes and bruising a limb or two—it’s much more challenging to sympathize with something we’ve never experienced ourselves.

The human world is infinitely complex, and the range of human emotions, circumstances, and experiences is far too wide for us to explore all of it fully (not that anyone wants to know how it feels to be terminally ill or having a nasty bug crawl on your face).

Still, the more things we go through ourselves—challenges, struggles, and little disasters, small and first-world as they may be—the more we learn to understand others. And understanding others is what helps us write believable, realistic characters—since we know how they feel and can portray those feelings in a convincing way.

Gratitude for Disaster

I have switched many careers in my life, most often out of the desire to escape something I didn’t like about my current career. While I’ve grown a lot in the process and developed new skills, I still found that the things that bother you in one place will simply manifest themselves in some other form elsewhere.

My perspective changed only when I finished writing the book I plan to publish next year (you can read the first chapter here). It is with this work that I learned to appreciate the difficulties I underwent—because if I hadn’t faced the challenges I have, I wouldn’t have been inspired to write it.

Life, for most of us, is not as simple as going on a quest or fighting some villain, when the good and bad guys and girls are clearly defined, and you know just what to do. Writing stories that follow these lines can also feel overdone, boring, and expected.

You want your story to be complex, your characters to undergo interesting events, and the storyline to require some mental effort from your readers. Well, good news—the more bad stuff you undergo, the more ideas you’ll have for the possible twists and turns of your character’s fates!

In this way, your personal battles stop being a source of suffering, but turn into opportunities to learn, and eventually to the stories you tell. These experiences come with time, and until you haven’t stumbled upon some challenges, you might find it hard to draw an intricate path for your characters’ development.

You Can Show Yourself the World

Another way in which years and experience enhance your writing abilities is through the opportunity to see more of the world. It’s difficult to write about what you don’t know, and reading about it will only give you a single-dimensional and brief understanding of that subject matter.

While you’re young and haven’t had the chance to work in different places, meet all sorts of people, and travel the world—getting exposed to a variety of cultures—the content you will be able to draw from when writing will be very limited.

So while it’s not age itself that gives you access to these things, the more time you have to experience the world, the richer your pool of experiences, ideas, and knowledge will be. This pool will fuel more interesting characters, places, and events than living in the same town and seeing the same people for years.

Conclusion

So should you wait until you’re old and gray to begin writing? Absolutely not!

You can write no matter how old you are, but there are two main takeaways you can take from this article:

1. In order to improve your writing, you’ll need to expand your horizons and strive to experience more. This could be your call to push out of your comfort zone, embrace difficulty, and learn to listen and understand other perspectives. This is the journey that will better you as a person, and as a result, improve your writing.

2. Knowing that there’s a time when you’ll be more interesting, worldly, experienced, and wise means that there’s something to look forward to. Instead of fearing the inevitable passage of years, look forward to it as a more interesting time in your life (and not just one riddled with back pain).

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