Michael John Walsh

Truth Is Where You Find It

"The Comfort that Creates:
Why Experience Still Matters”

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    Readers rarely name it, but we all feel it: the quiet confidence that settles over us when a writer clearly knows their terrain. That comfort is not accidental; it is the natural by-product of experience refined into craft.

    From mountain summits to café stools, a writer’s first—and most reliable—storehouse of material is lived reality. Yet raw experience alone is not enough. The alchemy happens when habit, place, and readiness fuse into what rhetoricians call rhetorical action: the moment when words rise naturally to meet the truth before them.

    Consistency is the gateway. The more often a writer enters the same creative posture—physical or mental—the faster the mind slips back into “writing gear.” Think of Hemingway, standing at his bedroom typewriter so a sentence could be netted before it drifted off on a Key West breeze. Muscle memory rescued the fragment; discipline kept him there long enough to finish the thought.

    But comfort is also geographic. Great explorers have sought meaning in deserts, at sea, or on frozen peaks, yet none understood those places as intimately as the locals who lived them daily. Immersion—working the nets with fishermen, breathing dust alongside nomads—grants a credibility no research shortcut can rival. Journalism calls it going to the source; storytellers might call it earning the right to speak.

    Routine, then, is the scaffolding. Immersion is the fuel. Together they allow a writer to harvest the rhetorical power buried in personal experience and translate it into sentences that feel inevitable.

    The mandate is clear: Go before you write. Don’t delay until circumstances are tidy or fear subsides. Venture out while pulse and curiosity still hammer in your ears. Catch the insight while it is bright and volatile, before it “evaporates into the ether,” as surely as a tropical noon.

    Or—as Dylan Thomas warned—rage against the dying of that light.

    Write standing, write sitting, write wherever the story finds you. Just make certain you have first lived enough to deserve the reader’s comfort—and their trust.