A Writer Without Tragedy is Useless

People don't really get writers. Well, I should say they don't really get them unless they are writers themselves. From a completely objective position, it's not hard to understand why. If you're a journalist and you're writing about the really interesting, important stuff, then you're probably putting yourself in the way of some kind of harm. Fiction writers, arguably the most difficult to understand, spend their lives telling stories, inspiring the idea that we aren't really doing anything, but the "why" of us doing so is a lot more complicated than many people think.

You know Carrie has some tales to tell.
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To a certain extent, writing is about storytelling, pure and simple. Telling a tale about a great character, a great story; that's what it's all about. However, if you're willing to dig a little deeper, you will find that most of us are maladjusted in some way. Some of us have had addictions and use our writing to figure out that ever present plague. Others have experienced some sort of violence and use their words to try and make sense of it. If you're seeing a trend here, then you're on the right track; a writer without tragedy, big or small, is useless.

What Makes Tragedy Our Lifeblood?
I argue that tragedy is so important to a good story, a good writer, because it gives you an answer to search for. You may know why you had to get a divorce or why sexism exists, but in the same way that knowledge is differentiated from wisdom, so, too, is knowledge separate from understanding. That understanding, more than anything,  is what gives the writer so much power to craft an honest, authentic story.

Anecdotally, I recently had the misfortune of being defrauded by a debt collector. In trying to do the right thing and improve my financial status, I attempted to pay off a legitimate debt to an illegitimate collector. This, in its own way, is a tragedy. It placed severe limits on weeks of my life, a sacrifice that would have been well worth it had it been legitimate. This is an insignificant type of tragedy when compared to heartache, death, and the like, but it nevertheless serves as a catalyst for a story I'm really interested in telling. (Being proved naive is a great driver it turns out)

Surely, You Can't Mean Every Writer Has Experienced a Tragedy!?!
No, I don't mean to say that every person has experienced tragedy, at least not in the first-hand sense. Even writers who cover the stock market, however, understand a type of loss; they understand what it means for the markets to crash and for people to lose their livelihood, if only in an abstract sense. In the end, this sort of understanding, whether from a first person or third person observer perspective, is essential in crafting a story that people want to read, whether you're droning on about the change in federal interest rates or bringing truth to people in the form of thoughtful fiction.