How to Mine Your Story for Creative Inspiration

Write What You Have Lived

Everyone who’s studied the craft of story has been told, “write what you know.” The trials I experienced in my youth to develop as a writer propelled me to grow. The “what you know” isn’t what you discover by research or reading other authors’ work. It’s lived experience. It's the trials and tests that forge the raw materials of talent and desire into skill and proficiency, in life and in craft.

I have stories no one else can tell because I’ve lived a life no one else has lived. Yet my story is universal, in the sense that the very thing I was created to do was attacked at a very young age, and that inciting incident launched me on a mission, a quest to overcome the shame of failure and the antagonists of discouragement and doubt. I prevailed, which opened the door for new inciting incidents to launch me into new quests that eventually led to becoming an award-winning published novelist.

I lived the protagonist’s journey. It answered questions about me, showed me who I am and what I’m made of. Something went wrong, terribly wrong, and I overcame. That is the essence of life and story, and it is rich material from which to create beautiful metaphors of life, portraying deep truths that take readers on their own emotional journeys and help them understand their own stories.

Mining Your Truth

Alfred Hitchcock famously said, “A story is life with the dull bits cut out.” The protagonist’s journey in any story answers questions about the protagonist, the opposition, and overcoming them. The high-level questions every story answers are a useful framework for mining the truth of your life experience as creative fuel. Here’s a quick demo using the story I shared above from my life:

• Who Am I? The first big question a story answers is who the story is about. We meet the character in a setting, a point in time, in a life context. As you consider your life journey, recall defining moments and think back on how you saw yourself then. In my story, I was a fifth-grade kid with a troubled home life, fumbling my way through school on my own, doing the best I knew how. Start there, then add depth layers of perceived identity—your own, family, groups. The deeper you allow yourself to go, the more material you have from which to fashion a believable and relatable protagonist.

• What Do I Want? Think of desire as a wild sprout, brimming with potential, in need of cultivation and training to bear much fruit. My fifth-grade self in my story had a desire to learn how to write a good story. In the sharing of this account here, elements of backstory come to mind, about how my parents, especially my mother, tried to silence my voice by saying things like “you’re being fresh” when I was around other people, particularly cousins. In her mind, being friendly and outgoing wasn’t good. There’s more there, too. 

• What Has Disrupted My Pursuit? My inciting incident was stark and painful. You’ve had moments like that too. Pause with them. Write them down. Remember the feelings, the sounds, the smells, the air, the thoughts that came to mind. 

• What Must I Do Now? In a story you want people to read, the protagonist can’t look at a disruption and say, “never mind.” Oh, she may decide to run from it, find a workaround, seek an escape. But a disruption demands a response. Examine yours. Remove the “dull bits.” See what’s left. Use it to inform how your protagonist will initially respond to the disruption. And herein lies an opportunity: in real life, people seek to avoid pain more than they seek gain. Recall disruptions to your status quo that presented opportunities to grow, but required sacrifice—a new job, a learning opportunity, earning an advanced degree—and examine how you responded, the emotions that manifested, the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that crept in, and how you faced up to it.

• What/Who Opposes Me? In The War of Art, Steven Pressfield names Resistance “the most toxic force on the planet...if you believe in God (and I do), you must declare Resistance evil, for it prevents us from achieving the life God intended when He endowed each of us with our own unique genius.” In story and life, the first and often greatest opposition comes from within. The forces of opposition in story can be classified as internal, interpersonal, social, environmental, and spiritual. In my story, I saw that nasty fifth-grade teacher as opposition...but was she? Or was she a flawed but necessary person that God in his grace allowed to cross my path? Probing questions like this don’t need real answers per se, but can be useful to stimulate character development. 

• Do I Have What It Takes? We all face moments in life when we’ve tried and tried and tried and not accomplished our goal and asked this question of ourselves. In a story, this usually happens at the midpoint, before the protagonist decides to go on the offensive against her antagonist(s). In my story, the English proficiency exam failure was such a moment, and there’s lots of territory to explore about how I did respond, how I could have responded, and how I can imagine a character dealing with a similar failure in their journey.

• How Do I Overcome Myself? When I was a boy, I didn’t...I quit. As a college freshman, I didn’t have that option (of course I could have just said “college is not for me” and left university, but thankfully I didn’t see that as an option). Trials build character. Strong character overcomes external opposition. This classic story beat happens in life every day. Explore the ways you have and have not overcome yourself and give your characters those same struggles, and your readers will be right there with you.

• How Do I Overcome Antagonists? We all want to see a protagonist muster up the courage and the resourcefulness to vanquish his opponent. We’ve all experienced great and small thrills of victory and agonies of defeat. Stories need both. In my story, the drive to escape the “remedial” stigma motivated me to go above and beyond the requirements to make sure I fixed my problems and broke free before the end of the term. How have you overcome opposition? Your experience doesn’t have to be dramatic, but it has great dramatic potential with the “dull bits” taken out!

• What Have I Learned? Growing up and into young adulthood, I believed no one was on my side and I had to figure out life on my own. Over time, I learned the truth of “no man is an island” and the importance of community. How many stories have you read or watched where the protagonist comes from that kind of background? Do you have those kinds of experiences? What have they taught you? Dive deep, and bring up the precious stones and rare earths to fuel your characters’ arcs.

• How Have I Grown? The resolution of a story needs to be the final revelation of how the protagonist has changed and grown through her journey. Unless your character is James Bond or Scot Harvath, who pretty much do the same things to overcome the same types of antagonists with the same outcome, the degree of growth needs to reflect the depth of the struggle, giving the outcome meaning and purpose. For me, overcoming the failure of the proficiency exam was the climax of that episode of life that propelled me to the next level of growing into my “unique genius.” In a previous Spark article, I made the case that experience alone doesn’t teach us; it’s evaluated experience that can show us what we have learned and how we have grown and our “next level” opportunity.

I’ll close with a quote that hangs on my wall from the poet Maryanne Radmacher:

Words matter. Pay attention. Write to learn what you know.