This, That, and the Other

For this week’s Blogging Insights prompt, Dr. Tanya has given us a quote from Anaïs Nin, a French-born American diarist, essayist, novelist, and writer of short stories and erotica, and asks us what we think of it.

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”

They always tell wannabe novelists to write what you know. To me, that means drawing on your own life experience as fodder for your writing. It could also mean creating characters for your story based upon people you know or have run across in your life, or characters who are combinations of such people.

So as an author lives, in real time, the experiences — the people, places, and events — that he or she will eventually use as material for their novel, they may relive it a second time, in retrospect, when they write about. It gives them a sense of tasting life for a second time.

That’s one interpretation of the quote. Another is more like what Tanya wrote about in her post. She wrote, “Revisiting what you have written is a good experience.”

I generate my Flashback Friday posts weekly and that requires me to go back and read posts I’ve previously published and select the ones I want to feature. In doing so, I am seeing, often for the first time since I originally published it, a post I wrote in the past. I’m not sure if I’d go so far as to say that doing so gives me a second taste at life, but it does allow me to admire some of my previous writing or to shrink back in horror at the typos, misspellings, and grammatical or punctuation errors I made the first time around.