WRITING FROM YOUR HEART

“Long patience and application saturated with your heart’s blood—you will either write or you will not—and the only way to find out whether you will or not is to try.”
—Jim Tully

You've heard it often enough--"Write what you know." This is excellent advice for the novice who is learning her craft. However, to engage your readers and make them care as much as you do about the characters and story springing from your imagination, I think you must also write what you feel.

By this I don't mean fill your story with melodrama or tell the readers what to feel--I mean tap into the emotions inside that  compel you to write this particular story. Every story I've written that has been successful has sprung from some incident lived, observed, or read about that moved me deeply, haunted my mind, and metamorphosed eventually into the germ of a short story, play, or novel.

My first short story that won a contest was based on a true incident. As a child I loved to read about fairies. I yearned to believe in them and so in turn I told my younger sister elaborate stories about the lives of the little people who populated the woods. In an effort to make her believe, I once dressed twenty tiny dolls in gauzy wings and bright silk material and hung them on threads from the limbs of the highest tree I could climb. They fluttered like little birds when the wind blew. I never forgot her look of enchantment when I led her out to see them in the early dawn. 

This, with a twist of fantasy, became "Flight of the Fairies," and won first place in the first Fantasy Gazetteer contest. The story was fiction, the emotion was genuine. This has proven a truth that guides me. Write from your heart. WRITE ON!