Henry David Thoreau once said, “How vain is it to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.” He wasn’t vain. Thoreau spent a good amount of time in seclusion in a cabin he built in the woods. He wrote one of his most famous works, Walden, about what he discovered about himself while there. He wrote, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
Thoreau had a good idea. How can someone write about life when they haven’t even experienced it themselves? A while back, I took a break from writing my novel. I was about to start college; I felt I needed to live in the moment before I could start writing again. Eventually, I started back again with fresh ideas.
I believe the more life experiences you collect, the more ideas you will have for your writing and directly proportional, the better your writing will be. Your writing won’t be confined to your limited experiences. It will be able to burst off the page, dancing with joy because it reached its full potential.
So, for now, put your pen down. Close your laptop. Go out for a night on the town. Make mistakes. Learn from them. Then come back and write about those mistakes.
-Landman
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