Each writer has a moral choice to make—or to ignore—when approaching subject matter based on personal experience.
You can approach writing as a "living autobiography," a personal perspective and minutia of your own life, but doing so with immediacy, as it's happening, and not from a hazy and nostalgic vantage point.
That doesn't mean your story shouldn't dip into the past. It almost always juxtaposes the present with the past. But the tone is different somehow. The wisdom from reflection is really not that interesting. Wisdom is boring. I love the idea of wading into something and simply getting it written without worrying if you can tell yourself or anyone else what it means or the "lesson" from it.
Lessons are not final anyway, but rather a shape that forms for a moment above the commotion of daily life, like a cloud in the sky that floats elegantly for a time but soon dissipates.
Like happy endings, they can depend greatly on where the narrator stops narrating. It is better to write to understand, not because you already understand. It makes me think of one of my favorite quotes from James Baldwin, from a 1984 interview with The Paris Review:
"When writing, you're trying to find out something you don't know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don't want to know. But something forces you to anyway."
This seems to go against some of the most foundational advice for writing memoirs or "personal essays." I have often heard: you have to have distance and space to write about "something that has happened." But maybe you don't really need that after all.
An essay or a longer piece of personal writing, written without distance, might lack perspective. But I'm not so sure there's really any proof that the passage of time will be what can make writing good instead of easily forgettable.
It certainly does not guarantee it. Plenty of personal writing written from a safe vantage point can fall into the trap of trying to be "wise." Of trying to tell everyone what it all means, the lesson, how they're different or better now, or some other superficially imposed narrative of cause and effect.
Writing about something from the thick of experiencing it may lack perspective. Once you think you're safe from its visceral reality, writing from far away could be too predictable or clichéd and lacking a pulse.
I'm a believer that the wisdom of hindsight is overrated. Just get in there, and don't be afraid to get your hands covered in the messy essence of the story.
Author: Greg Twemlow, Editor, Publishers Studio