Write With Your Heart, Not With Your Head
Great Stories Come from Within
Previously Published in Medium
Apr 24, 2024
My Best stories didn’t get much traction, but they’re the ones I loved writing the most. They are the ones where I opened my heart, bared my soul, and shared my feelings. The ones where a reader might feel what I was feeling when I wrote it.
There is something therapeutic about opening up, and sharing what you feel. Like talking to a therapist, except using the keyboard for my voice.
I started out writing on Medium as an exercise, flexing my storytelling muscles, keeping them in shape after I had finished my novel. Then I spent a little time trying to figure out how people were making money at it. That didn’t work and so I eventually moved on to just writing. Writing what I felt. Sharing a story as if a conversation with friends.
Not all of my stories are good, and some are better than others. In a few though, I could really feel my thoughts and emotions coming through my writing. Coming through the keystrokes as if my feelings were typing. That was special, like talking with a friend, sharing the moment.
I think the stories that you can share on a personal level, something that you love, or something that you lived, might be the best stories. Those are the ones that people can feel when they read them. The kind where a reader might share the emotions with the writer, even though they don’t know each other.
Not all good stories are like that, though. Nor do they have to be. There are as many different stories in the world as shiny shells in the sea.
But I think, no matter what you are writing about, if you write with a passion for the subject, the readers will see it, and they will feel it. It will come through your descriptions, your narrative, or your expressions. They will feel the joy, or the knowledge, or whatever it is that makes you passionate about your writing, they will feel it when they read it.
So, next time you sit down to write, choose something that makes you excited. Something that touches your heart, stimulates your brain, or just plain rocks your world.
Put your joy of writing into the story, and I will feel it when I read it.
“Writing is its own reward.” — Henry Miller