In a post on DIY MFA, Virginia Hartman says that writing about past hurts and trauma can be cathartic and can help others experiencing the same emotions. “I believe a story can uplift, amuse, and encourage, but no matter how lucky you are, by birth or chance, everyone experiences grief,” she says. “Everyone knows loss, and everyone needs, at one time or another, to be consoled. So every story has a seed of something that is not exactly joyful.”
If you want your writing to feel authentic, you need to dig deep into your own emotions. “It can be glancing, it can look different, it can be combined with humor and quirky characters and people so different from you as to be unrecognizable, but a current of something real must run through those personalities—at least a drop of something you’ve felt must pulse in their veins,” Hartman writes.
But how do you do it? Hartman suggests starting with an image, interaction, or piece of dialogue that touches you, either funny or tragic. What do you associate with it? Which of your senses become engaged when you sit with this idea. Create a sensory experience and imagine which of your characters might experience it too.
Next, consider how that character is different from you? Can you borrow traits from people you know or have observed to make the character more well-rounded? What does this character want? What is in their way?
Hartman often suggests that her students write about what bugs them. “Getting the annoyance, infuriation, or out-and-out fury onto the page, while scary, is often fruitful, because the emotion is real,” she says. “A writer can lay something extremely intense and heartfelt onto a character who has a completely different set of immediate concerns, wardrobe, appetite, interactions with others, yet still has this one central thread of feeling that guides their actions.”
Now go back to your original exercise and consider why that snippet caught your attention. “The analysis won’t make it into the fiction, but your understanding about what struck you as story-worthy will make you more sensitive to catching these moments of inspiration,” Hartman says. “The trick is to feel it coming—the image, the look, the sound that you have to write down before you miss it. The more you catch those impressions, save them for later, and see how they develop, the more attuned you’ll be to saying hello to them when they arrive.”
