: Re: Dealing with personal trauma in writing Often, I develop mythos that are based on extensions (sometimes fantasy-based) of personal trauma. There are times when it becomes too personal and I literally

@Debbie451

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If your issue is that you want to improve your writing when you are not writing about a personal crisis, you need to work on strengthening your imagination.

You may be finding it easier to transcribe a trauma because the feelings are in your head, very alive and immediate. That's exhausting, however, and not necessarily appealing to your readers. Good drama makes for good storytelling, but not all personal dramas are good stories.

What you essentially want to do is practice being someone else. You need to learn to get into someone else's head so you can observe what that person is thinking and feeling. When you have a sense of what someone who is "not you" is going through, you can start to create a character who will not be flat.

I hesitate to recommend writing fanfiction, but if you're passionate about a TV show and you're already part of an online community, that might be a place to start. TV characters are already drawn and demonstrated for you, and there are other fans to "check your work," as it were, so you could use that as a training exercise. Can you write a drabble (100 words), a vignette, a short story from the POV of one of the characters? Then ask someone else who watches the show if the character's voice and actions sound right.

Or depending on your personal proclivities, maybe take an acting class instead, and learn how to build a character a different way. That skill could then be extrapolated into your writing. (And acting is somewhere more productive to dump your "moodiness." ;) )

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