No wonder writing is such hard work! You’re strip mining your own head, every day, searching for this stuff – and then those moments of revelation are like a godsend.

-Russel T Davies, The Writer’s Tale

 

I often write from experience, and if you’re a writer yourself, you’ll know how awkward that is to explain to people:

 

Me: “Yeah, it’s kind of a personal story, I suppose.”

Them: “Uh…this is about a girl who has an inappropriate relationship with an older man and flies around on an airship through a sort of liminal space?”

Me: “Well, yes, it is, but…a lot of it is based on my experiences.”

Them: “*sideeye*”

Me: “No! NO! Not the inappropriate bits!”

Them: “So…the airship, then?”

Me: *bangs head on desk*

 

The point is, when you write a character, any character, you’ve got to get into their headspace: their actions, their thoughts, their dialogue. Not only must it be internally consistent, it needs to feel REAL. And while it’s possible to model experiences after things you’ve read or seen or witnessed, at the end of the day, a writer is drawing on their own experience of any given emotion in order to effectively portray that emotion.

For me, the process is something like this:

“Okay, so this character is sad. What does sad feel like? Well, there’s a feeling of isolation, like being encased in glass, where you see happy happy people all around you but interaction isn’t only undesirable, it feels physically impossible. So…let’s write that down, somehow?”

Now, the character might be sad for reasons that are completely foreign to me, personally–it’s hard to know exactly how someone might feel after they’ve been blackmailed, gone on a terrible bender all night, and then accidentally fallen in love with their friend’s boyfriend–but I know what sad feels like. I know what isolation feels like. So you take those experiences and you build off them.

 

Bart: “But now all I have is this weird, hot feeling in the back of my head.”

Lisa: “That’s guilt. You feel guilty.”

-Simpsons, s5 ep19

 

Inevitably, through this process, the story becomes personal: not because these things happened to you, but because you put a piece of your own experience into it. And that can be challenging.

Slogging away at my current work-in-progress, I had to write a scene in which a woman gets an email from her crummy ex-boyfriend. Of course, this needed to feel real, authentic, and very much in-the-moment.

So I decided to go back and see if I had any actual emails from MY crummy old boyfriend lying around.

I’ll spare you the details: it was unpleasant. But to write this scene, I felt I needed to, very briefly, get back into that headspace. I had been happily married for years at that point, and needed to try and remember what a messy breakup felt like, and how that was expressed in words, by both parties.

I hope I succeeded. It wasn’t fun, and much like getting into a bath before you check the temperature, I basically launched myself right back out again going “YEOWWW!” and feeling a little scalded. But all this is to say:

Writing is hard work. You are strip-mining your memories, gathering the raw materials necessary to create a false experience that feels like a real one. Because while YOU might not know what it’s like to be abandoned by your dark-elf boyfriend because he’s afraid of commitment and also going off to be a medic in the dragon wars…well, if you work hard, at least your readers will understand the sadness of being left behind.