Draw Inspiration From Your Life

Really good writers make you feel something. Somehow, they use their mystical writing powers to tap into your deepest, most primal emotions and draw them out. They do this by using echos of their own experiences - their own frustrations, their own troubles, their own joys - and inserting them into their writing.

This can be very frightening. Sharing your most intimate thoughts and feelings with a bunch of strangers is difficult. But your most powerful emotional ideas are probably also your most interesting ones. Although your internal censor is important for keeping a conversation on friendly, neutral territory, you do not need to keep your guard up when you are writing. In fact, it is important to knock that wall down.

Remember a time when you were totally happy. It could have been yesterday, or it could have been decades ago when you were much younger. Remember a time when you were consumed by guilt. How would you put those emotions on paper? Use experiences from your own life to put emotion into your writing. You do not need to keep the circumstances identical, just the emotions. It is a writer's job to be every character, to feel every emotion, to experience everything so that they can retell the experience.

There is a place where you need to draw the line. If you have a killer in your novel, no one expects you to go out and murder someone so that you know what it feels like. But reading autobiographies about murderers, imagining how someone might feel after committing a murder, and drawing upon your own experiences and amplifying them (were you ever angry enough that you wished someone were dead, even though you would never actually hurt them?) can create a startlingly accurate picture.

Personally, to express feelings of grief, guilt, self-hatred, and betrayal, I draw on my own experiences with my mother. Coming out to her was very painful and difficult. Although I certainly do not wish to repeat the experience, it is somewhat therapeutic to inject those experiences into my writing. It leaves more room inside of me for new feelings, better feelings. It's a little like sucking poison out of a wound.

Conveying the human experience, its pleasures and joys as well as its faults and limitations, is every writer's job.