You Don't Need Explosive Trauma to Write Intimately Personal Stories

The most common response I get when I talk about using lived experience as a story engine for your fiction or screenplays is some version of this:

“That sounds powerful. But I don’t think my life has been hard enough for that.”

And I understand why.

The word trauma carries a, sort-of, weight, carries images of catastrophic, singular events that announce themselves as life-defining moments, that make headlines or fill therapy offices or show up in memoirs.

Not everyone’s lives look like that.

Some of our pain is quieter. More ordinary. Some has accumulated over years rather than being delivered in a single blow.

And so writers read about how I describe using lived-belief as a story engine and they self-select out before they’ve even considered whether their lived experience qualifies.

I want to argue that the threshold isn’t trauma. It’s belief, sometimes I call these quiet conclusions.

And everyone, without exception, is carrying beliefs and quiet conclusions that cost them something to hold. And what can make that especially tricky is that those beliefs are SO VERY GOOD at keeping themselves hidden.

So.

Let’s reframe some terms.

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