Creative Writing For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Chapter 3

Finding Material to Work With

IN THIS CHAPTER

Drawing on your own experience and other people’s as well

Mining your emotions

Distancing yourself a bit

Practicing techniques to reshape your experiences

Most fiction comes from your own experience and your own emotions. The poet William Wordsworth once famously said that poetry was “emotion recollected in tranquility.” Both aspects – emotion and calm recollection – are equally important in creative writing. Your emotions are what drive you, what make you want to express whatever it is that you want to express. Even if your aim is to articulate an idea, that idea resonates with powerful emotions for you.

You need to develop a certain distance from your emotions, however, in order to write about them effectively and communicate them to others. And you need to develop a story, situation, or scenario to enable those emotions to build up and be released in a way that makes sense of the experience to yourself and to your readers.

Writing from Experience

In one sense, everything that you write about is connected intimately with ...