Writing From Personal Experience

Recently, I had an experience at a restaurant that I'm definitely going to use as the first scene in my side project (which I will talk about later). So I figured now would be a good time to talk about writing from experience. 

Say your character is a high schooler who is being relentlessly bullied. And-- happy coincidence-- you were also bullied to tears in high school. You can write from those experiences to make the bullying feel real. 

Now, I'm not saying you should retell a story from your high school days where some idiot told you you were fat. I'm saying that you should use your emotional experience to write from the point of view of a character.

Emotional experiences are basically how you felt when the aforementioned idiot called you fat. Did you feel angry? Ashamed? Did you even care? Describe how you felt, rather than the exact events that went down. 

Let's use another example. Say you're at your dad's funeral. In the middle of your grief and sadness, a little writerly voice whispers in your ear, "Hey, at least you can write about this." 

So you do write about it. But maybe none of your characters' dads die. That's okay. The feelings of sadness and grief are pretty much universal. You could just have them lose someone or something important to them. It doesn't matter who or what. The reader will feel for them, because everyone has lost something. 

The gist of this post? Use universal emotions to ground your story, to keep your readers interested and feeling for your characters, and to vent a little (just a little. Don't get carried away.)

Happy dumping piles of feels onto your readers and bathing in their tears! *Glares pointedly at Rick Riordan and J.K. Rowling*