Having no personal experience, I could only answer this hypothetically. I would write as I have done everything in my life: to try to make the world a better place. To the extent that my personal experiences shed light on what I think would improve the world, I would talk about them.
I know that people identify with personal stories more than theoretical statements. You can see that by looking at which answers people give most lurve to. The ones with more personal stories are more well received, no matter who writes them.
If I were to add some personal story about writing here, people would like this more than this dry theoretical answer, although this is actually both personal and theoretical, so I have no idea what people will think.
The thing about personal stories is that people can interpret them how they want, and most people want to do interpretation themselves. They don’t want to be told what to think. So if you lay out a story, they can draw whatever conclusion they want. Sometimes they’ll even draw the conclusion you want them to draw.
No one actually cares who anyone else is, I don’t think. They do care about the story they read and the extent to which they can identify with it. But the details could be anything, so long as they are vividly described and the reader can get a visceral experience through the words.
When I was young and I wanted to be a writer, everyone always said to write about what you know. But I had no idea what that meant. What did I know? The things I knew seemed so mundane to me. Why would I write about going to poetry class? What could I say about it? It seemed so perfectly ordinary and I couldn’t imagine how to make it interesting. I didn’t understand that my experience was unique and simply trying to write about it as descriptively as possible would make it interesting to others.
Now I have something in my life that does make me unique in a fairly easy way. I write about it all the time because I think that if I share my experience, it might help others. I couldn’t write about it as pure self-gratification. But to share with others that they are not alone; that there are others who understand and have been there—that seems important because
I have experienced the healing power of having others tell me I’m not alone in my depression. I have heard others use the same metaphors for depression. The words they use are freakishly similar to the ones I use, which dismays me, because it means I’m not unique, but also comforts me, because it means I’m not alone.
I believe you can make anything interesting. We all may be bored with things we do every day, like pissing, for example, but I bet you could take an activity that everyone knows intimately and make it interesting simply by observing it closely and describing every sense and sensation as accurately as you can. It would be interesting to pose this as a fluther question.
In my mind, there is a significant difference between an amateur writer (like me) and a professional. Professionals get paid to write. The marketplace says their words are worth a lot more than mine or anyone else’s who puts their words online for free. To call yourself a writer, it seems to me (and I know people disagree), you need the approval of the marketplace.
So I don’t belong here with @marinelife and @elbanditoroso and @cookieman and @Pachyderm_In_The_Room and any others who actually earn money through their writing. But perhaps you can forgive my presumptuousness and find the view of a non-artist or non-writer as possibly containing some merit. Although, as I always say, it doesn’t matter since I write first to find out what I think, not to entertain others. I must admit, however, that it is quite rewarding when others are entertained.
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