Can one truly become a great writer without a wide array of experience?

Can one truly become a great writer without a wide array of experience?

Yes, see my work.

Link

post excerpt

Of course you can. However you should be widely read, be thoughtful and interested in people, and have imagination.

Sure, but it's less likely
Also, it turns out apparently you can have a wide array of experience and still not be a great writer

Veeky Forums has thought me way more about humans than school or irl human friendships.

This is something I've been working on:

He ate lunch alone, on benches far from the cafeteria, listening to music—his sort of refuge that was like a tunneling in his desolation toward a greater desolation, further from others and himself, closer to the shared source of everything—with portable CD players and earphones, feeling sorry for himself, or vaguely but deeply humbled, though mostly just silent and doomed. Sometimes, thinking of how among fifteen hundred classmates only two others, that he'd noticed, were as socially inept as he—a male in his grade, an obese male one grade lower—Mott would feel a blandly otherworldly excitement, like he must be in some bizarre and extended dream, or lost in the offscreen world of some fictional movie set in an adjacent county.

Your issue is you have it the wrong way around, you have a wide array of experiences only from being able to create them imaginatively.

The difference between a boring every day interaction and a funny or insightful story is how you tell

>only two others, that he'd noticed, were as socially inept as he
or three, if you counted God.

>Sometimes, thinking of how among fifteen hundred classmates only two others, that he'd noticed, were as socially inept as he—a male in his grade, an obese male one grade lower—Mott would feel a blandly otherworldly excitement, like he must be in some bizarre and extended dream, or lost in the offscreen world of some fictional movie set in an adjacent county.

Wow, I know this feel. Like, it is statistically shocking that I ended up being in the bottom 0.1% of social ability at my school

Holy...I want more

generic - whiny

yo i was actually offended when someone suggested i attend writing workshops when i said i wanted to write like bro my 3am shitposts are the teat that gotham writers workshops have to suck on for material for the next 10 classes

isn't me

I liked the other one more. Yours isn't bad and I understand what you're going for, but, personally, the mark of good writing for me is a clear communication of direct experience.

>the mark of good writing for me is a clear communication of direct experience.
How does one come to have such shit opinions?

By being unpretentious.

why don't you just read autobios?

if you're not in it for the language and not in it for the irony then why even bother reading literature?

I think you misunderstand me. I think prose (not so much irony) is important, but I think a novel succeeds on it's ability to capture scene and character in a language that's relatable to a reader. To do that, it has to be based on accurately captured experience, sensation that is direct and inutive. Take a book like Ulysess, when Joyce talks about "the sea, the snot green sea, the scortumtightening sea" that visual image is powerful because it triggers certain memories I've had of sensations that line up his own description. A fantastic author to me is someone who as in inutivie sense of the connections between image and experience and can bring out these links and impressions with only words.

Of course, this is only subjective user. And I wouldn't mind reading an auto-biography, if it wasn't a genre written by hacks and ghosts.

Yeah. Someone post that Kafka quote.

>wide array of experience
What is this meme?

All the great authors had DEEP experience not wide. Fucking post-modern educations ruining everything.

>Virginia Woolfe
>Aldous Huxley
>Charles Dickens
>Mark Twain

Literally ALL of them just wrote about their lives.

which one?

yeah, we misunderstand one another

I still think you're missing several layers of irony inherent in that Joyce passage. It's not just a one to one relationship, personal experience to language, especially when read against the "white breast of dim sea" line

What a rarely polite argument to have on Veeky Forums. I'm glad really, that we understand we are on the same page.

On the topic of irony, I think it depends on the style. For Joyce, it is certainly relevant and it allows for a breaking away from a purely superficial reading that you are right to say I perhaps value too much. But today, I think we have become over-saturated with irony to the point that it is almost entirely superficial, because nothing remains at the surface to talk about. There's a sad gap between the ironic knowledge of a writer like Kierkegaard to the infantile excuses certain more modern authors make in any interpretation of their work.

The West was almost literally build by monks.

Can this "social butterflies are always doing it better" fad just fucking die already?

It's not about being socially capable, it's about going outside and seeing human interaction.

Sure man, Marcel Proust was a NEET who never left his bedroom

Jane Austen and Emily Dickinson managed it.

Jorge Luis Borges. Spent 90% of his life inside a library.