Writers as "Experience Junkies"

A few years ago, a friend of mine characterized writers as "experience junkies." Her point at the time was that writers tend to be self-destructive in pursuing relationships, vices, and other singular interests without giving enough consideration to the consequences of these actions. A writer might start a fist fight or date someone he doesn't particularly like just because these can be interesting ways to pass the time. This is the Jack London and Ernest Hemingway school of writing, and while it may be a cliche, it raises intriguing questions about the need of a writer to see and experience the world in order to be able to write about it.

Although most writers are not "type A" personalities and do not require excessive adrenaline stimulation to be happy, they might follow these self-destructive paths simply for the value of the experience. Writers are not known for being particularly happy, after all, so why shouldn't they at least experience interesting things? The idea is to suffer and take good notes while suffering.

I'm not sure I subscribe to this way of thinking. At any rate, I'm sure I'm not self-destructive in the same way that so many of these famous writers have been. Maybe in some ways I am an "experience junkie," but I'm a junkie who has successfully made the switch to methadone.

Of course, life influences fiction, but fiction also shapes life. As Cary Tennis, one of the more poetically inclined advice columnists, observed: “A novel forces its characters to live through whatever it is. That is the great cruel power of the artist: To force his characters to live through whatever he chooses for them.”