It’s been said that you should “write about what you know”. It’s also been said that doing that condemns you to a life of boredom as you’ll never grow beyond your current limitations.

Not very helpful, is it?

It’s also been said that you should write about what you’re passionate about, interested in or otherwise taken by, as you’ll spend so much time researching it, writing it and rewriting it, that it had better light your fire, or it will drive you insane. And then again, others say don’t tackle a topic you know nothing about, you should write what you know….

And so we go around in ever decreasing circles.

I actually subscribe to the “write what you know” line of thought, but with a bit of a twist. I encourage writers to write about what they know on an emotional level.

Try writing a story that heals YOU. Emotions are the universal language. We all feel the same feelings, we may just experience them in different ways. We all recognize joy, love, peace, anger, resentment, jealousy and fear and when you tap into this universal language with your stories, you speak to the hearts of all readers. As you and your characters go on the roller coaster ride, your readers will go with you, and as you and your characters heal, so too will your readers see a way out for themselves.

Have you ever read a novel that’s changed your way of looking at the world? I certainly have. Try this simple tip, and you’ll soon be writing stories that change lives as well, including your own.

Write about something that will change your life.

Now by this I don’t mean sitting back and thinking, “What would change my life? I know! Divorcing my wife/leaving my job/selling my business and trekking across Africa/buying a ski lodge in Switzerland/running for President”. That’s not the type of change I’m talking about.

I’m talking about real change – the type of change that starts on the inside and works its way out. And while it may eventually manifest in divorce, resignation, liquidation, traveling, new businesses or political aspirations, it is not the way the change looks on the outside that matters as much as how it looks on the inside. And once you get the inside right, the outside takes care of itself.

As writers of fiction we are constantly living inside our own imaginations, aren’t we? True creativity occurs when experience meets imagination. The best way to write stories that resonate with others, that capture them from the first page and don’t let them go until the last, is for you, as the writer, to delve into your own basement of emotional experience and retrieve images of universal resonance to deliver to your readers.

JK Rowling said that the Dementors were definitely born of her own depression. The mirror of Erised was her own desperate desire to spend just five more minutes with her own mother, who passed away as she wrote Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Harry’s search for a family of his own was paralleled by Jo Rowling’s desire for the very same thing in her own life.

You need courage to be a fiction writer. Courage to expose your own wounds, courage to go to the places you haven’t been before to heal them, and courage to decide you have the strength to go on the journey in the first place.

We have all had our ups and downs in life. And saved somewhere in our unconscious databases, are all the emotions, all the traumas, all the joys and all the images of our lives. As you access these buried emotions, a curious thing will happen. You won’t necessarily relive the actual events that happened to you. By drawing on the emotion, and allowing it to be your guide, your imagination will fill in the missing bits, and you’ll find yourself retrieving images, scenes and situations that may be very different to your own actual experience. Writing a memoir or autobiography is not the goal. Writing a story with emotional resonance that others will want to read is.

Try this simple exercise: Sit with your feet flat on the floor, hands resting on your thighs, your eyes closed. Take 3 to 5 deep breaths. Now in your mind’s eye, see a spotlight shining on a brightly lit stage. Step into the spotlight. Take a few seconds to grow accustomed to the shift in perspective. Now I want you to feel real anger. Feel the heat of it coursing through your body. How dare they? What right do they have? Ask yourself these questions over and over in your mind until you have worked yourself up into a white heat of fury. Now in your mind’s eye, allow an image to form around you, the source of your anger. What’s happening? Who is there? What can you hear? Coming up with a first sentence, write for 10 minutes on what happens next.

When you’ve completed this exercise, take a break, or come back tomorrow and try this next exercise. Following exactly the same process, feel forgiveness instead of anger. Allow the sense of true forgiveness to envelope you. Then when you are ready, allow an image to rise in your mind’s eye, and coming up with a first sentence, write for 10 minutes.

Did these two pieces of writing connect at all? Did the forgiveness relate to the anger, or vice versa? Don’t worry if they didn’t. Just know that as you utilize this process when writing a story, you will write a progressive story of great emotional resonance, and in so doing, you will be unconsciously training yourself to experience this journey in your own life.

This is a simple exercise to show you the power of accessing your unconscious through emotion. Once you become accustomed to using this method, you will find all kinds of magical thing occurring to your writing, and all kinds of wonderful healing occurring in your own life.

Writers of non-fiction are bound to an extent by the limitations of science and provable fact. They can speculate, philosophize and hypothesize, but until someone can come up with “proof in a test tube”, it is essentially speculation.

When you write a story, with a character confronting their issues, overcoming their obstacles, facing their demons and changing their lives, you are unconsciously writing a guidebook that shows others how to make those changes too. Fiction writers offer real solutions. Real emotional solutions. We may not show you how to fly to the moon, or how to crack the property market and walk off with millions, or how to build a successful e-commerce business from home, but we can show you how to really live your life, how to relate to others, how to relate to yourself, how to heal relationships and how to lead more blissful lives.

And that’s pretty terrific, don’t you think?


- Suzanne Harrison

u know exactly how your story ends before you start or leave it to chance? Different writers go about it in different ways. Find out what suits you best.

Here are four ways to arrive at how your story will end:

1. Just do it.

This is where you start writing from page one and hope it will all turn out right in the end. Fingers crossed.

Some writers deplore this approach, others find it works for them.

You’ve got an idea for a story and maybe the main characters are coming alive in your head. You’ve no idea how it’s going to turn out, but you want to go for it anyway. And with luck and a dry wind you may well get there. So go for it. Only time will tell if the creative tide is flowing strongly enough to get you to the promised land or not.

The danger here is that your story might get stuck on the sandbank of I-don’t-know-what-to-do-next or totally shipwrecked on the rocks of This-is-a-load-of-rubbish. If it’s the first then you might just get rescued. Read your story and jot down the main events so far. Now put your thinking cap on and decide seriously how you want it to turn out. Then do ‘what ifs’ to find a path into clear water and on to landfall.

2. Bare bones.

This is where you write down the beginning, middle and end of the story, but otherwise leave it to develop itself.

Not a bad plan this one unless you’re writing a mystery or detective novel and you need to plan things out more thoroughly than that.

For short stories it should work well.

3. The whole caboodle

This is more applicable when writing a novel or a very long short story.

Write a detailed synopsis, maybe broken down by chapter or section, so that you know exactly how it’s going to work out in the end.

Some authors use the ‘cover-the-wall-with-A4s’ method. Take a sheet of A4 for each chapter and write on it what is going to happen in that chapter. Then stick them on the wall in chapter order. This makes it easier to see at a glance what’s going on and how everything links up. Use different coloured pens if you want to follow say a subplot through so that you don’t forget anything.

This has the advantage, providing you’ve got the wall space, of being able to change things quickly, add, delete or merge chapters as you go along. You could use Word for Windows and read it all on screen, but it’s just not the same.

4. Suck it and see.

Get the first chapter down on paper to give yourself an idea of whether you can visualise it running on to a satisfying conclusion. You may or may not know what that is to begin with.

This method is good if you have a novel in mind and don’t want to work out a detailed synopsis to start with.

When that first chapter is finished and it excites you, gives you goose bumps or simply that yeesss! feeling then you may be onto a good thing and it’s worth taxing the brain cells to get the whole framework sorted out.

Conclusion

From personal experience this is what I think works:

Methods 1 and 2 work well for the short story; 3 is best for the longer story or novel, and 4 works OK for either.


- Mervyn Love

Never have I followed any standards which restrict my writing. Do you know why? I know the reason why, but do you? Poetry is the most personal form of writing for me and I would never let anyone tell me how to write my feelings down on a piece of paper, nor will I let someone tell me how to type my personal thoughts and feelings.

Writing poetry down on a piece of paper may not be as popular these days, since we have our own little PCs and MACs, but that doesn’t mean that you have to let writing poetry become more standardized. Writing on the internet can give you a larger audiance and sometimes people will try to intimidate you, there will be more people trying to tell you how to write, or they will tell you how they want your poetry to be, but don’t be intimidated by them. Your poetry is your own and having no standards really brings out your full potential; this is a fact, if you really look at how the greats in poetry have written their work.

Through the ages poetry has been revered and written in different ways, but never has great poetry been written by someone other than the individual who wrote it, so don’t waste time with people who try to bring you down, I can’t stress that enough. There really isn’t much to tell here, but what I have said to you. If you really want to be great, then just be yourself.


- Joseph Smith

Sometimes writers block comes because we’re really not happy with the way our story is progressing. Maybe it’s too obvious. Perhaps it just doesn’t feel like it’s coming out the way you imagine it. Or maybe it just doesn’t have that special spark and just kind of lays there on the page like a bad hairball.

One of the best ways to get around this kind of writers block is to do a bit of brainstorming on paper. In this exercise you’re simply noodling on paper, so you don’t have to worry about getting anything right. (For those who don’t know, noodling is something jazz musicians do when they’re just messing around and trying things out.)

Start by writing down what’s going on in your story up to the point where you’re stuck.

Now write down any ideas of what should be happening in the scene you’re stuck on. You don’t have to write in complete sentences. It can be just a few words or scribbled notes. Just as long as the jist of the scene is there.

It could look something like: “So far, [a couple of words about what has led up to this point.] So now Jane is planning on doing X.” Or “Sue really needs Bob to do Y.” Maybe Jane is going to pick something up at the store. Or maybe Sue is going to meet Bob at a restaurant in order to persuade him to do something.

What this does is remind your muse what’s going on and brings your imagination up to speed.

Now write down the actions your character needs to take in this particular scene, why and what needs to happen as a result. In other words, what does your character want to happen as a result of the action she takes in this scene?

Now write down ten different ways the scene could go.

It doesn’t matter if some of them are wild and crazy and really out there, or even if you’re never going to use any of those ideas. What matters is getting creative with your story ideas. What usually happens is that you’ll end up coming up with a much more interesting way the scene could play out and that will get you excited about your story again. Chances are you’ll also create new depth in that scene and make your story richer and much more interesting.

You might even come up with ideas you can use in other scenes or even a whole new subplot. Which means it will be a better read for your audience and a better write for you.

It’s important not to censor yourself here. Remember, you’re just coming up with alternatives and ideas. It’s like playing in the sandbox.

So – how many ways can you come up with for your scene to play out?


- Kieran Mckendrick

I have such bad writers block. Sometimes I won’t get any ideas at all, and others I will get the stupidest ones in the world that I have to write or they won’t leave me alone. This time is the worst though. I got writers block- in the middle of a sentence! I’ve tried thinking of different ways to write the sentence, I’ve taken a break, I gone through my notes and the rest of the story, but that sentence keeps getting stuck- right in the middle! Help!
- S M