The longest story short - Part One

Here’s some food for thought: do you really need any real life experience to be a good writer, song writer or a painter for being a highly regarded creative artist? Of course, some may argue that a vast real life experience would tend to give an edge to people over those who lack it. However, I want to question the basis of this assumption: what really is a real life experience? How real is real life anyway? We live mostly in our own heads. So does it really matter if we’ve been out there and done that? What if someone has a highly active imagination of such intensity that it can leave someone else’s swathes of real life experience far, far behind and what if they present an equally compelling portrait of creativity? Which one will be regarded better by an audience: the one from the person who had lived out a lot or the one from the person who had lived much more inside their own head? Is it difficult to imagine a vast dimension of world inside your own head? And if so why?

Consider Sir Issac Newton. He was already living inside his own head solving complex life questions, working hard towards finding the meaning of life. He already had put up enough work in that direction. You can’t really claim that just because Newton decided one day to take a stroll outside, got tired and sat under a tree where an apple famously fell on his head that he suddenly became aware in an inspiring way regarding the existence of gravity. That would be like cheating Newton out of all the hard work he had put up in that direction in the first place.

So, to bring a long story short, the whole purpose of this rigmarole  is to find out whether I can be a writer of any good regard or not. I happen to believe I lack most of the real life experience that people so much boast about. But I also happen to have an unusually active imagination. Imagination, that more often than not, takes me into the realms of surrealism. Of course I agree, surrealism is not reality. It’s far, far removed from what is reality as we know it. But my question is, is reality really real? It’s like Schrodinger would’ve said, can you really predict the outcome of the cat experiment? If you say the cat lives before opening the lid of the box and the cat actually perishes, you’ve just changed the reality that you perceive. So when reality itself is as surreal as surrealism is, why do we bother with being in the “real” world and having a “real life” experience? How much better off will we be if we have one, and how much better off will we be if we decide not to have any?