On Experiences

I was thinking about a time when an old friend came to visit me recently. He was passing through Buffalo on business and we hung out over night. We both like house music, so we went out to a club. They had live DJs playing and it was a total blast. I could write an excessively long chapter in a memoir based on that experience at the club, and we spent all of four hours there.

Four hours. That's it. But in those four hours, so much happened, all at once or one after another, that it was more experiences than the vast majority of my ho-hum life before or after it. This is an experience that I will remember for a long time and will draw from.

This actually leads into another observation (actually, one I made quite some time before). Some people sound like they have incredible lives, rife with action, hilarity, drama, etc. Thy have seemingly unending stories that make you wonder what the hell you've been doing that you are not as interesting. But, those stories are not unending. The stories do finish and the number of them is finite. And, if you listen to somebody long enough, you start to see that their life is just a collection of experiences, not unlike your own.


As I said, I draw from my experiences. As I also said, I could write a memoir chapter just in detailing the events of a single night. Imagine what could be done by infusing the essence of this experience into my writing. What stories could I tell? What characters could I create? (I don't expect you to know the answer because you weren't there, but I do invite you to hypothesize.)

So what are your experiences? How much can you say about a single experience if you tried, and how much real-world time did it take to actually experience it? How can you use these experiences to influence or inspire your writing without directly writing down your experiences?