Write a thriller: Bad experiences make you a better writer

Remember how it feels to feel bad, endure it positively, and write it down

When something bad happens to a writer, the experience is great material for something bad happening to your characters. Remember the feelings, the way your mind processed it and the sensations of tension in your heart, your veins. Get it all down on paper and save it for when you need to give those emotions to a character. The experience can teach you how to be a better person and how to be a better writer.

This ought to make you feel better at those low times. Because you know it’ll come in useful.

British writer Alan Bennett is known for his mordant wit, for making dour experiences seem somehow wistful and alive. “For a writer, nothing is ever quite as bad as it is for other people,” Bennett writes, “because, however dreadful, it may be of use.”

Negative experiences can change you as a person — for the better, if you approach them positively.

The Roman emperor and stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius wrote that a negative experience should be recognized for what it is: something that has happened, and nothing more. Our response is far more important than the event itself. “What is there in this that is unbearable and beyond endurance?” he wrote. The answer is: Nothing at all.

With that attitude you can take the negative experience and use it for your fiction, while also growing spiritually with a sense of acceptance.

Read more Write a thriller posts with tips and analysis from Stephen King, Raymond Chandler, Dan Brown, and many other great novelists.