Chapter Two:

Gaining Insight For Creativity Through Negative Experience

If you are thinking to yourself that you could never write for a publication because you don't have any ideas that are worth publishing, then think again.  

Do you have a negative experience that you have learned a valuable lesson from? If so the experience and the valuable lesson learned are definitely the stuff that makes good material for writing either an article or a short story.

Relating these experiences to people might help someone else to learn a lesson without them personally having to go through the negative experience. Describe the events leading to the experience and the aftermath of the events. Did you learn to avoid a certain situation?

·           Did you stay up to late to many nights in a row your first month in college and on one of your trips back home fall asleep while driving and wreck your first care. That wouldn’t be a very pleasant experience but there could be several things to learn from it if you just took a moment to write them down.

·           If someone got very drunk and ended up in the morning in a very uncompromising situation this would definitely be a story to tell once the embarrassment of the situation was dealt with.

·           You were bullied in school and feel that you have insight into keeping children and teens from being bullied in the way that you were.

Did you learn to approach a situation from a different viewpoint or a better way to deal with a problem? If so such experiences can be written about in many ways.

If you feel more comfortable making the idea into a short story do so. If you can describe the lesson learned more easily in the format of an article then definitely present it that way. The ideas are as limitless as your experiences and your thoughts in dealing with them.