A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.

I find this thought oddly liberating. So did Stephen Sondheim, who writes of what he had while writing lyrics for the unproduced musical Saturday Night, set in 1929 Brooklyn: “Observation and imagination, check; experience, no.” Lack of experience did not stop the middle-class Manhattanite from writing lyrics in passable working-class Brooklynese, so long as he could rely on observation and imagination to carry him through.

I find this liberating because it provides for multiple pathways to success in writing. It suggests that writing is not a brittle craft, where only those blessed with talents in all three of experience, observation, and imagination can write successfully. It allows the writer some slack—so long as you have any two of those three gifts, you can churn out a product that is not artistically deficient.

The three pathways, spelled out:

Given a wide range of life experience and a keen sense of observation, a writer need not be particularly imaginative to write something good.

Given a wide range of life experience and a vivid imagination, a writer need not be particularly observant to write something good.

And given a keen sense of observation and a vivid imagination, a writer need not have particular experiences to write something good.

Those are the claims summarised in Faulkner’s dictum.

I remember a controversy about a book a while back called American Dirt. It was a social issues thriller, telling the story of a Mexican woman and her son escaping cartel-related violence to live as an undocumented immigrant in the United States. It was nominated for several literary awards.

The controversy was that the author was white. The Latino community protested that she had no business writing about their issues, and that she got several things wrong because she did not live through their experiences firsthand.

Implicitly they are making a counterclaim: it doesn’t matter if you have observation and imagination; without Lived Experience, you can’t write a good book.

I don’t particularly know who to believe here, but as someone who writes for a hobby, it seems like it would be helpful for me to figure this out. Assuming that the experience/observation/imagination tricolon is a useful framework for assessing one’s strengths as a writer, here is how I feel about mine.

Imagination. I think I have the capacity for imagination, at least in the sense that I’ve spent my nights lying awake building a sprawling, centuries-spanning narrative for over half of my life. But in the sense of using imagination to fill out little details of architecture and clothing and mannerism and speech for characters unlike me and locales unlike my own? I think I need to practice that more.

Experience. There’s a lot of things I haven’t done. The subjects that I am able to write about with experience are pretty much limited to “going to school” and “playing music” and “going to work”. There are steps that I am taking to rectify this, but short of spending the next two decades of my life on a globetrotting adventure, backpacking through the Himalayas, serving in the Congolese army as a mercenary, having flings with old-moneyed Bavarian barons, founding ten startups and seeing all of them come crashing down in ten different ways, pulling off prison escapes in Kamchatka, waking up amnesiac on the streets of São Paulo favelas, leaving behind a string of broken hearts in East Tennessee, and leveraging all that into a six-figure book deal, I am pretty much consigned to the Not A Lot Of Life Experience bin. This is okay with me.

Observation. I think that of the three sources, observation would be the best thing for me to work on. People-watching. Listening to people in alleyways, in bodegas, in cafés, at the dry-cleaners, and transcribing their patterns of speech. I also think that this would be fun to do with other people.