Sometimes itâs easiest to explain things as a mathematical formula:
Perspective = (Experience * Consideration) + Time
A clear understanding of whatâs important to a story is a function not just of personal experience, but time and considered thought. This is one of the reasons I warn college students not to write scripts about college students. They may have fresh, first-hand experience of what theyâre writing about, but enough time hasnât passed to give the story proper consideration.
But thereâs more to this formula than the idea that you shouldnât write about what happened just last weekend. Consider the number of people who sit down to write, but freeze up at the thought that they havenât lived enough; that their personal experience is insufficient to have anything worth saying.
Look at that formula. A sense that you lack personal experience worth mining can be overcome through time and effort. Thatâs research. Thatâs writing and revising. Not every story needs to be about parachuting into occupied territory or barely surviving running with the bulls while hungover. A story about something small and relatable can have a refreshing perspective if the writer can take the time to discover a nuanced approach to the storyâs telling.
And some things canât be directly experienced. You arenât going to have a chance to experience life on Earth in the year 3652. You werenât a vampire in Victorian England. But the experiences you do have that can relate to those stories can be enhanced by consideration and time.
There are no set numbers attached to this formula suggesting that after x hours youâll attain enlightenment, but it does pose a set of questions for a person looking to pursue a story idea:
- What have I experienced that relates to this story?
- What about those experiences have I examined, and how deeply?
- How long have I been living with these experiences and thoughts?