Ross Raymond Nunamaker

I’ve come across this term as I’ve engaged more in short-story and creative writing in general.

The lived experience is the human experience expressed by an individual, a first person point of view, that transcends data and statistics on a subject. It may or may not align with theory or policy on the matter addressed.

It is more than what happened. The individual propounding a lived experience must reflect on the events and present their understanding of the impact of the events on themself.

The contrast of the before and after, the impact, and the event expose the espouser to their raw being in a gritty and beautiful world in order for others to gain understanding.

The lived experience as an outlier is true to the individual. It does not hold to be a universal truth, only a perspective, one potential truth in a world of many. 

In writing, I’m finding I heavily rely on my lived experience to tell stories. My voice, settings, characters and themes are all derived in some manner from it.

I have not lived all the stories I tell, but I can envision them as if I did. My first line of thinking was that I use creative lived experience, much as there is a category of creative non-fiction, distinct from non-fiction.

Both contain real events and people. In non-fiction exposition and information are presented in essay or similar form. In creative non-fiction information is given through experience and presented in narrative form.

My idea of creative lived experience is that the individual has some identification by way of adjacency that lends them to better understand the experience than someone without it. Creative in this regard doesn’t work as well as it does with non-fiction. A better distinction is ‘extended’. It is related to the lived experience, but not exactly the same. A basic example might be the struggle of addiction allowing for greater empathy for the struggle in a relationship, or vice versa when coupled with witnessing or study of it.

My best explanation is that when the reading doesn’t connect with the reader because it lacks heart and soul it is neither extended nor actual lived experience.

Why does it matter? In defining what good writing entails I started with, “I believe the quality of writing is dependent on the creativity and quality of the thinking that goes into it in equal measure with one’s mastery of the craft of writing itself.”

After writing a few pieces and planning to write more I now think the extended lived experience is critical to good writing and will be incorporating it.

What do you think of the lived experience as an aspect of writing well, and is extended lived experience a contradiction or legitimate?