Creativity isn’t born in comfort. It doesn’t reside in the familiar. It’s not housed within the known. However, most wrongfully assume it is.
You see, the easy choice for any writer is to stay within the lines, ‘to write what you know’, reach into your memory, pull out pieces of your life, and slap them on the page like you’re building a mirror.
It’s safe.
It’s comfortable.
It’s easy.
But safety never made a nigga feel something deep. Safety never shook a bitch to her core. And you know what? If I’ve learned anything from writing, it’s that the real power comes from pushing beyond yourself. It comes from reaching into lives and experiences that aren’t yours.
Writing from experience is like dipping your pinky toe into a shallow pool of potentiality. But writing beyond it? That’s diving headfirst into the oceanic realm which is the combined experiences of the entire human freaking race and beyond.
That, my friend, is where the good stuff lies. That, my homie, is where the true fun resides. And that, meu amigo, is where characters like Antonia and Kara from my novel N-Word are born.
Screw The Limitations of Experience
Let a brother be clear: there’s nothing wrong with writing from experience. But, it feels too much like regurgitation for yours truly. For instance, yours truly is a black English male born to Jamaican parents in Birmingham, England.
Do you have any idea how mind-numbingly easy it would be for him to do nought but sit on his chocolatey derriere and write about men like him from dawn until dusk?
It wouldn’t stretch him at all.
And it’s boring.
But Antonia, the 85-year-old from N-Word who lived through the civil rights era before dying in the present day and being immediately reborn in the body of a hot OnlyFans model? She’s lived through things I never will. Her battles and choices aren’t mine. I’m a black man from the modern age, but she’s a white woman born in the 1940s, so with that in mind, how the freak can I connect with her experience?
How, goddamn it, how?!
Well, that’s the challenge. That’s what makes me feel alive. My mission is to write characters who are nothing like me but do it so convincingly that it feels to the reader like the story was written by someone who’s just like those characters. My goal was to write about Antonia, an old woman, so believably that people who read the book assumed I must be a woman too.
And you know what? I’ve had multiple people say that’s exactly what they thought, which, ego aside, makes me genuinely smile.
Was that easy to pull off? Nope. Yours truly had to step outside of himself to do that. He had to vividly immerse himself within Antonia’s world, thoughts, and motivations while ignoring his own completely.
Yours truly had to become Antonia.
Imagine how difficult it was for me to write her sex scene with Blake but focus on her feminine experience instead of his masculine one. Or to accurately describe the various earth-shattering female orgasms she has in the book.
Like he said, yours truly had to become Antonia.
In fact, when I write I become my characters. When I wrote Antonia I felt like an empowered but traumatised woman, but when I wrote the racist characters in the book I felt ignorant and superior. To be honest, if you ever saw my face when I’m writing you’d probably think I needed psychological supervision.
And you’d probably be right!
But you know what? That right there is where real creativity resides. When you break out of the box of your own experiences and traverse the endless realm of possibilities that exist in the vast multiverse of ideas.
Embrace The Freedom of Imagination
Writing outside your own experience gives you ultimate freedom. It untethers your black ass from the weight of your own life and allows you to just create. You’re no longer bound by the limitations of what you’ve lived. Instead, you can reach for something new, something that challenges you to, as Apple once said, think different.
Take Kara, for example. She’s a Black OnlyFans model whose body becomes inhabited by Antonia. That’s a life yours truly has not lived, and a world he has not walked in shoes he has never worn.
But that’s the point.
I didn’t write Kara to reflect something I know. I did so to explore a life completely outside of my own. And through her, I was able to push my boundaries as a writer.
Kara’s existence isn’t about what I do or how I live. It’s about imagining and faithfully depicting her life, choices, and struggles in a way that feels real to her but more importantly, to you. It’s about showing that even though we think we’re different, at the core we’re all human beings and capable of understanding each other’s perspectives.
The Forgotten Power of Empathy
You don’t have to live a character’s life to write about it, you just need to deploy some empathy. Empathy is the bridge that allows you to cross into someone else’s world and see how similar it is to yours.
You may not know their specific struggle, but you sure as hell know the emotion behind it. You know how it feels to be afraid, to want something so badly it hurts, or to be vulnerable.
You take those emotions, weave them into the fabric of your character’s life, and voila, it feels authentic. We’re all much more similar than we think and outside of the thin veneer of differences we see each other through are all sharing the same emotions.
Indian families might constantly bounce between English and Hindi at home unlike American families, but they’re still ripped to pieces when one of them dies. An OnlyFans model might live a glamorous life of wealth and societal privilege, but she’s still going to be terrified when perpetually harassed by an online stalker who seems to know her every move.
And this, as said before, is where the true beauty of creativity is found. When you write outside of your experience, you’re not relying on memory but on your ability to understand and connect with humanity while also flexing your creative biceps.
Antonia’s story is about loss, love, and power.
She’s not yours truly and never will be but he knows what it feels like to badly want control over his life.
He knows how it feels to crave beauty and the egoic boost of being sexually craved by the masses. He knows how it feels to be deathly afraid of ageing. He knows how it feels to yearn for connection but fear the vulnerability that comes with it.
These are the threads I used to write Antonia’s story and make her decisions feel real.
Finding the Universal in the Unknown
I touched on this before but I’m gonna elaborate now. Even when you write outside your own experience, you’re still tapping into something universal. Love, fear, hope, and loss; they’re emotions we all share. The superficial details might differ, but the core feelings are exactly the same.
Antonia’s experience as a white woman navigating white and black worlds in America and feeling like she didn’t belong in either wasn’t that different from mine as a black man doing the same thing in the UK. I also didn’t need to have experience making bank from selling videos of my pedicured toes to understand Kara’s vulnerability at being harassed.
But to conclude this post I must warn thee that writing outside your experience isn’t easy and definitely isn’t for the faint of heart. Why? Because it’s a high-risk and high-reward strategy where if you succeed you’re a god but if you fail you look like a gibbering idiot.
But you know what? If Roald Dahl, aka a grown man who just so happens to be my favourite author of all time, could write from the perspective of a female in Matilda then I can do it too.
Ciao for now.
Excelsior!
