Frances Marion on Writing and Living a Rich and Varied Life

To paraphrase Carlyle, ‘A writer who could only sit in a chair and write stories would never write any stories worth the reading.’ Your story material naturally will be influenced in quality and quantity by the richness of your own life experience; by your own loving, fearing, suffering, struggling, and achieving. Therefore, as a writer, you are justified in seeking as rich and varied a life as possible. In any event, you need sufficient experience of your own so that you have some basis for understanding the feelings of persons undergoing experiences that suggest dramatic situations. If you have limited range of interests in life, you will be able to comprehend and will be susceptible to only limited lines of experience. By widening the range of your own interests, you will be enabled at least to comprehend additional varieties of experience.”
Screenwriter Frances Marion
How to Write and Sell Film Stories (1937)
page 167