“Why do you want to write fiction?” I open my fiction workshops at veterans’ community centers and grief support groups with this question. I’m partly curious why they signed up, but I also hope to better understand their motivation so I can tailor the workshop to the group.
When I first started teaching, I was surprised by the overlap in their responses. One participant held up his journal and said he was looking to translate his private daily entries into something he could share. Another said she had stories she wanted to tell but didn’t want the exposure that came from nonfiction. And in one moving moment, a woman shared that her youngest daughter passed exactly a year ago, and her friends and family had told her that writing would be a way to process. Through each response, it seemed I uncovered a very specific pattern.
They were looking for catharsis, for a way to do something with the stories that lived in their own experiences.
Soon I came to expect these answers. After all, some of the most famous authors—regardless of genre—seek something similar. From Joan Didion: “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking,” to Maya Angelou: “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” Even Ernest Hemingway once said, “Write hard and clear about what hurts.”
They were looking for catharsis, for a way to do something with the stories that lived in their own experiences.
But in the beginning, I had nothing to offer but to pass along the warning I’d received about fictionalizing experiences: it’s hard. Writing about something personal makes it harder to revise, harder to see as a moldable story. Since the emotions are closely felt and familiar, they often fall flat on the page.
But if so many people are turning to writing to process, why is there so little about how to do it well? I wanted to create a system that taught my students to use memory as a starting point to produce fiction that worked.
And this is how distillation and transplantation was born.
Distillation
This method came as I began to question my own writing process. Often the act of brainstorming for me can look like digging through memories. As an early writer, I’d simply select a memory and begin to dramatize it, changing names and exaggerating dialogue from a moment of extremity in my life. Now I encourage my students to use this memory as just a starting point.
After each student has selected a memory, the next bit is often the most time intensive, but usually the most rewarding. I have my students question why that memory is sticking out to them. Among other questions, I ask: Where is the emotional strength of this moment? What’s the climax of this memory? What would an outsider find to be the most interesting moment?
As an example, I share a memory about the time I tried to catch a bus. As it pulled up, I stood from the bench, stepped toward the curb, even made eye contact with the driver. The bus whizzed right past me, and I was left confused as I slowly sat back down.
In class, we briefly discuss what the most poignant moment is here. Sometimes thinking of it from a film perspective helps. Where is the camera pointing when this moment becomes the most interesting? We usually choose the shock and confusion that overcame me as I realized the bus would not be stopping, my eager face melting into a blank stare as the rush of wind whips my hair across my face.
It’s not quite yet the emotional heart we’re looking for (more like the emotional torso). If we stopped there, many students would end up with emotional cores like sadness, anger, heartbreak—emotions that are too broad. So, at this point, I bring out some version of Dr. Gloria Wilcox’s Feelings Wheel. In the center, we discuss how many stories we’ve read about these basic emotions. There are hundreds. Then we expand out a level. How many stories have you read about guilt or insecurity? The list gets smaller. By the third level, the stories get rarer.
The work of distillation is moving to the outer edges of the circle, sometimes beyond that. To do so, I encourage my students to turn the camera inward, feeling around into some fourth dimension. What was the context of their moment? Why was this a difficult experience particularly for someone like them?
Returning to my example, I explain that I was in a foreign country for the first time in my life. Weeks prior, I had read a Reddit post about how annoying and stupid American tourists were. After, I spent weeks avoiding taking the bus because I was certain I’d miss some sort of unspoken social cue and make a fool of myself.
And now we’re closer to the emotional heart. Sure there is shock and confusion, but these are sorta everyday, inner-circle emotions, the kinds that live in hundreds of stories and feel a bit too familiar. With a little more investigating, we unearth the fear of looking like a fool, the feeling of isolation that comes from a lack of understanding, the feelings of abandonment and betrayal.
Each of these feelings could be a unique story of their own, and sometimes students are lucky enough to find three or four or seven different hearts inside a memory, but all they need is one. I tell my students to pluck the heart of their choosing from the memory and place it carefully in the metaphorical cooler box where it will live until it’s found its transplantee.
Transplantation
With an emotional heart in tow, it’s time to find a place to put it.
With an emotional heart in tow, it’s time to find a place to put it. For more emotionally raw moments, it can be safer and more productive to give the feeling a new environment. Processing becomes easier when the writer gains emotional distance.
Transplantation is the moment we take the emotion out of its original container and watch how it behaves elsewhere. I walk my students through several different approaches.
1. Change the Location
First, we move the emotion into a new room. I ask students to imagine the emotion walking into a different space than the one it originally belonged to. Opposites often work well here: if the memory took place outdoors, imagine bringing the emotion indoors. If it happened at night, picture what it would be like at noon. If we disrupt the surroundings enough, the emotion must renegotiate its surroundings and, in turn, the story it fits within.
I ask them to close their eyes for a moment and picture the space in which the original memory occurred. Where would this emotion feel most out of place? Where would it feel magnified?
The key here is to ensure that you are distanced enough from the memory you began with, especially if that memory is a traumatic one. Our goal is to produce stories that address the underlying intrigue that bubbled the memory to the surface, while creating art that is moldable, revisable, and readable from an objective standpoint. For example, at a writing session for a grief camp, a student was working with the complex guilt that comes from feeling happiness while experiencing grief. She identified a specific moment in which she felt the guilt, usually in her bedroom as she went to sleep because that was the most confronting place in which her husband was missing. It would not, in this case, be as helpful to write a story in that same bedroom because this place is too familiar to that student. Even if she changed the characters, the experience would be too similar and pieces of her perspective would sprinkle in.
Instead, for her transplantee story, she moved the experience to the inside of a daycare, even going as far as to change the point of view to a four-year-old. After experimenting with this version, she wrote, “I better understand my experiences now. I’ve never looked at them this way.”
2. Think about Avoidance
In stories and in life, people often refuse to feel the thing they’re actually feeling.
Next we talk about avoidance. In stories and in life, people often refuse to feel the thing they’re actually feeling. I ask students to imagine a character who believes the opposite of their emotion or tries very hard not to acknowledge it. In pairs, they spend two minutes coming up with indicators that a person is avoiding feeling the emotion they’re working with.
For example, a pair brainstormed the following for the emotion “worrying about disappointing someone”:
- keeps smiling too big
- taps foot under the table
- swallows hard before speaking
- voice goes higher than normal
- keeps saying “it’s fine, I’m fine” too quickly
The goal is to notice what a person’s body does when their mind is trying to keep the emotion at bay. Avoidance almost always gives students more texture to work with, and often, their first real insight into how a character moves through the world.
3. Genre Swap
Sometimes an emotion won’t open up until it enters a world with different rules. Each genre comes with its own expectations and conventions and letting an emotion step into one of those worlds can reveal qualities that were hidden before.
I ask students to take their distilled emotion and imagine it living inside another genre. How would a sci-fi world shape this feeling? What would it look like inside a fantasy quest or a horror scenario or a romantic plotline?
In sci-fi, an emotion might involve misfiring systems or unfamiliar environments. In horror, emotions like dread or distortion have possibilities for being heightened, and romance often highlights longing, vulnerability, or miscommunication.
Sometimes their selected genre version shows them the story they actually want to write. Other times it simply frees the emotion from the constraints of the literal memory long enough to make it workable.
4. Metaphors/Similes
Finally, we shift the emotion into metaphor. I save this for last because often their metaphors are speckled with all the ideas from their location change, their avoidance brainstorm, and genre swap. I ask students: If this feeling were an object, a place, a ritual, or a physical phenomenon, what would it be?
This is often where the most surprising work happens. Students are usually drawn to metaphors to better capture their grief or trauma and enjoy the specificity and expressiveness of figurative language.
I have students free write for two minutes and give them several sentence starters to get them going, asking them to fill in the blanks if nothing else is coming to them.
[Emotion] sits beside me in a _____ and [does something].
[Emotion] is like a _______, [expansion/explanation].
[Emotion] lives in _________ and [does something].
Their pencils move vigorously for those two minutes, gates opening. One student wrote solely about the laundromat he came up with in the first exercise, “It sits beside me on the plastic chair, tapping its foot and watching the minutes tick down with me. Every washer door releases its lock but mine is still spinning, spinning.”
Safer Storytelling
In a cultural moment where public life is saturated with narratives of pain, teaching students to work with emotion in thoughtful, measured ways feels all the more urgent.
Distillation and transplantation are just some tools for our toolbox, giving us an approach that guides students into the world of fiction. By creating classroom practices that emphasize transformation and process, we show students that writing is not only about what they produce but also about how they engage with their own experiences. And in a cultural moment where public life is saturated with narratives of pain, teaching students to work with emotion in thoughtful, measured ways feels all the more urgent.
Also by Mary Shaver: “Better Brainstorming: Teaching Early Writers to Generate Ideas for Fiction“
Featured photo by DS stories.
