Intermittent Hodgepodge: Personal Experiences and Writing

They say you should write what you know.

At its core, writing is a practice of empathy - putting yourself in someone else’s shoes and asking yourself: how would you react? How would you feel? Oh, and also all that plotting and stuff is important too. Hell, by definition fiction authors are writing about things that never happened, people that didn’t exist, technologies that are only dreams. That’s our playground.

However, I believe the most powerful writing is rooted in lived personal, emotional experiences. What have you learned in life? What pains or joys have you experienced? And can you capture those lessons and feelings in words?

This year, I unexpectedly lost my father. Happy new years, right? Then I got COVID and had to isolate from my grieving family. It’s kind of eerie, but this experience very closely mirrors that of one of my characters in Waypoint.

Thinking back to how I expressed this character’s feelings about this experience - the writing may have been okay, but I think it’s also obvious at that point that I hadn’t experienced those things personally.

And because I’m me, as I was experiencing these intense things, I couldn’t help but think about my character, even in the midst of my own incredible grief. How would my own personal experience influence how I wrote about this character? The manuscript is done; it’s been done for over a year, but I think I will go back and re-examine how to relay the character’s experience better.

I had so many raw and intense emotions during that time, and they didn’t always physically manifest in the ways I find authors, including myself, write about tragedy. There were certainly moments of waterfall tears, but that certainly wasn’t the majority of my time. Most of it was honestly blank staring into nothing, being lost in thought. Looking for ways to distract myself. However, as a good friend of mine commented a few years back - many of my emotional characters in the past spent way too much time crying. Which, in hindsight, okay, fine, that’s fair. But now it feels even more poignant.

That’s just one example, though. If you’re a writer, how do you write about personal tragedy and intense emotions? Do you do your best to fake it? Or do you only write what you know? If you’re just a reader, can you tell if an author has actually experienced the tragedy they might mention? Let me know what you think.