This is the premise of the most recent post on the Magma blog. I was pleased to read the comments coming in on this topic because I have been wondering myself whether you can achieve true authenticity in writing if you haven't had the experience yourself. I left this comment:
Increasingly I find myself writing about things beyond my experience. I was suspicious of trying but found that actually, it is possible when you embed yourself in imagination. I think if you can conjure a strong empathy for people and situation then you are capable of writing authentically. I also research details to add to the authenticity. A little bit of real detail goes a long way. I can read anything if the voice is authentic. Sometimes the story/experience may well be true but I disengage because the voice lacks a humanity and therefore falls short of real authenticity. But of course this is just personal taste.
You can also draw on similar experience or emotion to write about something you haven’t experienced. e.g. death of a parent to write about death of a friend. Experience is often on a sliding scale and no one is surely so fully removed from anything in this day and age of embedded journalism and an invasive media, that they can’t find a way to the truth of a subject without having been at the very crux of the experience.
When it came to it, I realised I had made up my mind, and you can write what you haven't lived. I was interested to read the other comments posted so far, including one about attracting criticism. I think this is an inevitable part of the writing process, and can only help improve the writing. If you're not accurate with your detail then it's only right it should be pointed out. Hopefully from that point you can improve. Criticism will come either way. Besides would writing not eventually become stale if you don't strive to reach beyond the limits of your own imagination?
Lets try this again. A cave man doing his first blog. I have never been a 14 year old black boy in a closed community in North Carolina; a fly in the rotten body of a whale; an old compulsive collector with a grand father clock strapped to his back, but I have written about about them. If I only wrote about that which I knew, I would have a diary of interpretations at best and probably less than that. That which one knows is one arena. In my dreams each night I create landscapes, architecture, people, beasts and events. That is another arena. Emptying emotions gathered through life into other vessels of ideas and chosen situations is another arena. Language itself as a raw material offers its freedoms and limitations, possibilities and impossibilities.There are fashions of writing, as there are fashions art, of music, fashions of philosophy and so on. One is not even bound by sense. One can just have fun with the phonetic and go totally crazy with the semantic if the fancy should take you. A lot of it depends on why you are writing. There you go I have bloged, therefore I am. I can only comment as anonymous because none of the others in the list make any sense to me. A kiss to the world.x
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