For doing something serious you need the experience of being there, lots of reading and lots of your own reflection. If you saw things, but they did not awaken any reflections in you, there will be no good writing. Some mountain or storm came to exist for us only because Cezanne painted it. On writers and readers. The crisis today is not of writers, it's of readers.
Writers are good.
It's readers who are bad. It took me 40 years of experience and work to finally be able to write Imperium. A work like that can't be read in an afternoon. It's to be read as you read a poem, and that requires many evenings. The book is a message.