How personal should your stories be?
This occasionally comes up when I’m working with my coaching clients.
For reasons they might not be able to identify, they will feel that their stories are stale, or their endings are safe. (Often, they’re not wrong.)
I’ve talked in previous articles and on the blog about not pulling your punch when it comes to conflict. Unless you’re writing low angst work deliberately, you need to put your characters through it. If you think about it, how often do people in real life make significant changes without going through difficulty of some sort? It reflects human nature, to have change come through pain, effort, and opposition.
So, as always, that’s the first thing I bring up: are they doing enough to really hit the character with enough conflict to create the crucible that forces change?
The reason behind the reason.
No, they say. But they still balk at putting the characters through pain.
Sometimes, that’s as far as it goes. As they say, you can lead a horse to water, yadda yadda.
But sometimes, strangely, the set up for that crucible is right there. They’re setting up something – a character going through a divorce, a best friend dying, a strained relationship with a parent, whatever – and then they just let it fizzle out. Something magical happens, and everything’s rosy as the curtain falls. And when pressed, they finally admit it…
It’s too close to what’s happening in their real life.
How real is too real?
There are two edges to this particular blade.
The first is: drawing from our lived experience is one of the most pure and potent expressions of emotion. You will know every sensory detail, every thought that crossed your mind, every cascading repercussion that resulted from the event. You won’t have to imagine it. You’ll just have to remember it, and then… well, bleed it onto the page.
Which brings us to the second side.
If it’s a painful enough experience…
You. Will. Bleed.
There is no right choice here. Or rather, there is only a “right for you” choice, and only you can determine which it is
What if you don’t want to write about it?
I know, in my soul, that I’m a writer. Through writing, I find comfort and I learn things about myself that I can’t learn any other way. In so many ways, it’s a sacred, unwavering force in my life.
But I not a proponent of “everything else in your life must be sacrificed in the name of story.” I wouldn’t screw over friends and family, for example, to get down a story. I will not burn the midnight oil or blow out my health to capture those elusive words. While I value my work, I’m not precious about it. It’s my passion, but let’s face it. It’s also my job.
Therefore, I will never, ever tell a writer that they need to dig deep and reveal personal secrets, or mine the worst traumas of their lives simply because it’ll “make a great story.”
If writing something makes you feel sick, or scared, or tears open old emotional scars with a seam-ripper, don’t do it.
There is no shame in this. You can write phenomenal stories without a deep dive into your private tragic backstory. You don’t owe an audience anything, period. Certainly not your pain. So don’t let anyone tell you that you do.
What if you do want to write about it?
Let’s say you want to try, though. You feel like it could add to your writing, and the story needs something. Maybe you feel like you’re ready.
Admittedly, there is a certain catharsis in fighting your demons on the page.
Honestly, you probably are already – you just didn’t know that’s what you were doing. If you take a look at some recurring themes (and you have any kind of unresolved baggage in your past) you might find yourself sheepishly surprised at how often you’ve already been pointing a pen light on what’s been shoved in the subconscious dark.
If you’re willing to face it head on, it can be a game changer. It brings a level of authenticity, of emotional heft and impact, that nothing else can. Your reader will definitely feel it.
It can also give you a new writing tool, by clearly connecting your personal emotional mechanics to actions and outcomes.
When you were in whatever situation you experienced, you probably weren’t being analytical about it. It happened, you felt it, you did something. Other things happened.
If you think about “why did I behave this way?” or “why did I react this way?” as you’re constructing and revising a story, then you’ll break it down and, like watching the inside workings of a clock, be able to finally see how these things play out. Choices in fiction need reasons, cause and effect. This will give you some distance, hopefully (and also anesthetize residual pain) and provide insight that all the research in the world can’t.
It will also start to give you the skill set to apply to why other characters, people in their own right, will feel what they’re feeling, and make the choices to act the way they do. That’s the key to true character depth, and it’s valuable.
But again, like the doctor says… if it hurts too much, don’t do it.
Guardrails.
Some tips to safely draw from your own lived experience:
- Don’t use whole true life stories for fiction work. I have read too many manuscripts that are just people’s lives with the serial numbers filed off. For a variety of reasons, including consent (because odds are good you aren’t the only one in the vignette), and finally for sheer story construction issues, just trying to transcribe what happened doesn’t tend to work. If you want to do that, pursue memoir. It’s a valid genre. Instead, what you’ll probably be doing is extrapolating the experience, and applying it to your story. For example, if you had problematic family dynamics, you can create an amplified, but different family, that still showcases dysfunction… but different dysfunction, even if the pain is essentially the same.
- The most important thing is to capture the emotion. That will be what’s relatable to the reader, and that is what will hold the most power. You don’t need to capture your divorce in minute detail to convey the grieving process for losing someone, anyone – friend, lover, family member. They will still be able to resonate with the sense of loss.
- If it gets too disturbing, pause. Make sure, as always, you have a support network in place to help you. Pack on self-care. Check-in with your emotional and mental wellbeing. There’s no point in trying to write the most glorious novel in the world if you’re self-immolating in the process.
Always here to help.
If you’re still not sure where you fall, or just want to talk to somebody about it, you can always reach out and email me. I’ll try to help in whatever way I can.