Well... writing is all about what we know, right? Or so I was always told. And it's true that we reach into our personal experiences in life to create characters and stories that will feel real and resonate with readers.
But writing has a few lessons of its own to teach. The most important may be that the bigger the challenge, the bigger the opportunity.
Writing a story should never be "easy." If it's easy, something is wrong. The characters have to face challenges and get into extremely difficult situations. As I have learned, when I box in my characters in to the point where I want to beat my head on the keyboard for a solution, that's when I have to become most creative. That's when the challenge I have set for myself and my characters become a huge opportunity to tell a ripping good story.
The curious part comes when I look at some major challenge in my own life, hovering on the edge of despair, this little voice in my head says, "Well, this will be great for a book some day." And that reminds me that challenge creates opportunity.
If you are considering writing a story, look at your life, at the times when you thought things were beyond repair, or even hopeless. In those seeds you will find the most important lessons about writing and life. And you'll have some idea of the emotional intensity you need to bring to your story and the extremity of the challenges your characters need to face.
You may put your characters into a situation you have never personally faced, yet your experience of the "it's impossible!" situations in your own life will give emotional truth to your characters regardless of which challenges you set them.
These challenges and conflicts we face in life give the texture to our days, the meaning to our existence. These same elements bring a story to life and engage a reader.
As I said once in a speech, the lower the valleys, the higher the mountains. Without the lows in life, there are no mountain-tops of joy.
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