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Notes -
I think the valorization of "lived experience" for writers and artists (which, in practice, typically means the valorization of a specific kind of experience, to the exclusion of others - traveling to distant places, exposing oneself to physical danger, etc) is misguided.
Consider this post, which linked to this graph, where people were asked how many unarmed black men they thought were killed by police in a single year. About one in five "very liberal" respondents said that the number was 10,000 or more - but the actual number is nowhere near that high. Now imagine that someone has the "lived experience" of watching their unarmed black male friend get shot by a police officer. Perhaps he hears one or two anecdotes from friends that they also knew people who had similar experiences. We can imagine that this experience might affect him greatly; we can imagine that he might start to think that this experience is more common than it really is, and he might go on to write an award-winning book about it, and this book might produce more people like those 1-in-5 Very Liberal respondents who think that police shootings of unarmed black men are much more common than they actually are. In this case, we would want his lived experience to at least be tempered by some "book learnin'". Otherwise, he might go on to write a book that was quite politically deleterious. There are some truths that can never be arrived at even with a lifetime of "lived experience" - there's no getting around the need for data, abstract reasoning, the need for knowledge of other people's experiences so you can find the common patterns.
Or consider all the things that are in principle impossible for anyone to have direct experience of. If you want to, say, write a book that deals with the historical connections between contemporary wokeism and Stalinism, or maybe the French Revolution - you're going to need to read other books for that. Eventually, historical events become so distant that no one alive could have experienced them.
That’s not the value of lived experience in narratives. The value of having fought in a war (Hemingway for example) is that he understands the way war is in the real world and can thus create characters who feel like they’re fighting a war instead of characters that think and act like people who make movies think people in wars behave. Or if you want to write about life in a black ghetto, it’s going to feel more real if written by someone with at least some idea, even second hand, of what that life is actually like. There’s a phrase in philosophy that I think captures the idea. It is like something to be a person in any situation you come up with. It’s like something to be poor, or Palestinian, or a cop, or a soldier. And stories become much better is the author at least has some idea of what those things are actually like, rather than going off TV/movie tropes, or stereotypical ideas, or other sources with no real connection to the thing being described. It’s a fidelity issue. A copy of a copy of a copy eventually looks nothing like the original.
You all may be interested in this Critical Drinker video: Why Modern Movies Suck: They're Written by Children
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My point is not that having lived experience will lead you to have a more accurate picture of how the world works. I'm saying that if you have lived experience of X, if you're writing a book about X, then all things being equal it will probably sound more convincing than a book about X written by someone who has never experienced X firsthand.
Could a novel written by an underprivileged black youth about his experiences growing up in the hood contribute to a progressive's erroneous impression that unprovoked police shootings of unarmed black men are widespread? Sure. But all things being equal, I would expect such a novel to be a lot more affecting and convincing than a novel on the same topic written by a creative writing MFA from a wealthy family who's never even set foot in the hood.
Sure, but even having broadly comparable lived experience might be more beneficial to the creative process than just pure research. The experience of fighting a battle in Baghdad in 2003 is unlike the experience of fighting a battle in the Somme in 1916, but I would expect that the two experiences have far more in common with each other than they have with the experience of sitting in a warm cottage with a pot of tea reading a book about the battle of the Somme.
This depends on the readers. If both the writer and readers have experience in X, then the readers can recognize things from their own experience in the written work, and thus think it is realistic. But it could also happen that the writer has experience in X and the readers have none, and the reality of X is so far removed from the readers' own experience that they find a realistic depiction of X unbelievable.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RealityIsUnrealistic
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