The Story or The Experience?

My 18-year-old daughter, an aspiring screenwriter and film maker, suggested that we collaborate on writing an action screenplay. So, we devised a plot and identified several key characters and were then off and running with our individual assignments ... at least so I thought. I was dumping, editing, revising, "making it work" while she was sitting idle. Whenever I would ask how she was progressing, she would emphatically state that she'd never written an action story before and was having some difficulty. So, we made some adjustments to the assignments -- she got to create the sub-story between the male and female teen characters while I worked on other parts -- and we each went off writing again.

When we regrouped a couple of weeks later, she made a similar report as before, that she didn't have a lot of practical experience with relationships to apply to the situation so she was again having difficulty. I grew perplexed. I explained to my daughter that, "As a middle-aged woman I've never experienced life as a 16-year-old boy with Asperger Syndrome, but I've used largely my imagination and a lot of research to create a 35,000-word novel about the same. Aren't fiction writers expected to write about things they've never experienced before? If not, J. K. Rowling surely has had quite an interesting life.

So, I pose this question to all writers - established, aspiring and hobbyists - as a general rule when writing fiction which comes first, the story or the experience?

Talk to me ...