Have you had an experience that you want to share with the world? Perhaps you’ve achieved a success or a goal, or simply had a good time. It could be anything from a holiday with your family, to a life changing event that happened in your past. Write it down, in the form of a book or a short story. Having your own experiences reflected in your writing can sometimes bring out the best in you.
It’s Easy
One of the main reasons why writing about your own experiences improves your writing is, because it’s easy to write about! You don’t have to imagine characters, or settings, or what happens to the characters. It is all inside your head, and has already happened. It is real. All you have to do is put pen to paper and write the story down, as it happened. There is not a lot of imagining or thinking to do here, and that may sometimes help you to write a better story.
It’s Heartfelt
Another advantage of writing about something you have gone through, is that it will turn out to be heartfelt. Your writing will subconsciously transform the “story” into an “event”, since it really was an event in your life, and you will write about it with feelings and emotions, which will ultimately be transferred into the story. Your story will have a life of its own, and the readers will be able to feel it too. They will connect with this “event” of yours, and they will feel how you felt, when you had that event in your life. Writing about your experiences will make your book more soulful.
Helps Remove Writer’s Blocks
Maybe you are going through a block. You can’t write about anything without tearing a couple of pages every minute. The best thing to do in such a situation is, turn to your past experiences. Relive your past, think of an event which you believe people would like to read about, and start writing. You will be amazed at how easily the words come out of your head. It’s like magic! Writing about past experiences has proven to be a very effective tool to overcome writer’s block for a large number of authors over the years.
It’s a Way to Let Go
There may be a memory in your head that you are clinging on to, you dwell on it all your life and you want to re-live the memory again. Writing about it is the best way to re-live the memory, and then, perhaps, let go. Once you let go of the memory, even though it’s always there in your head, you will stop thinking about it consciously. This, in turn, will make your head more free and relaxed, and this, in turn, will help your writing in the long run. The experience may be good or bad, and you may not want to write about it and relive it if it is a bad one, but once you take the risk and write about it, without thinking about the consequences, you will reap the rewards in the long run.
Image credit: POCKETFA on flickr and reproduced under Creative Commons 2.0
Pranay Kanagat is a freelance writer who has a love for writing on various subjects. In particular, he enjoys creative writing. He is also studying for an Engineering degree.