Can language capture the enormity of experience?

Posted by Ron B'Jergendy | Posted in

Our experiences shape our beliefs and everything about us. Language is our way of passing on our experiences and beliefs. It is our challenge as writers, to convey our experiences as best we can. Common writing advice is "Show don't tell", an idea that you should not just tell your audience something, but set a scene, give examples, and try and let them go through your same experiences through your writing. By showing, the reader can get a much better idea of your experience. But good writing is still not enough to capture the enormity of experience. The best writing can create its own world or an alternate reality. It can let the reader know exactly what is going on and what everyone is thinking, but it cannot put them in the same place in actual reality. It cannot let them go through the experience in the manner or process that they would choose and it cannot make the reader think about the situation with the same time scale as the experience. Language can capture a lot about our experiences, and it is our job as writers to do it the best we can. The truth is though, that nothing beats experience. When going through something first hand, you get to ask the questions and decide how you answer them. Language can capture a lot, but it cannot capture everything.

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