ARTICLE

Transforming Personal Struggle Into Great Writing

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Tracy McMillan grew up in dozens of foster homes and has been married and divorced three times. As a writer for television, film, and books, she's found creative success from the lessons she's learned in her own relationship struggles.


Omega: In your memoir, I Love You and I’m Leaving You Anyway, you write about your experience in relationships and how they can be one of the hardest and most rewarding parts of life. You write the phrase, “If I’m hysterical, it’s historical,” talking about how emotions can run high during conflicts. Can you talk about what that means?

Tracy: I've had to do a lot of healing. And I heard someone else say it, so I don't take credit for it, but when I heard it, I thought, “That's the truth, isn't it?”

When I have those super-charged reactions it's because I’m connecting with some unresolved feeling from the past. It can't be resolved with the person in front of me. It takes a lot of pressure off of your current relationships because you start to realize that so many of your reactions are not actually being driven by the person you’re interacting with.

We spend our entire adulthood working out the first 10 to 15 years of our lives. A certain amount of your reaction in adulthood is coming from that early childhood experience. And hopefully, over time, you can reduce the percentage of how much that's driving the way you're responding to the world.

Because unless everything in your life is exactly as you want it, there's work to be done.

Omega:  How can we turn personal struggles into good writing material? What has worked well for you and what writing mistakes have you learned along the way? 

Tracy: The number one thing that makes writing good is perspective. You need to know what happened. You want an awareness in your writing, even if you're writing about the beginning of something. Now, you might not have that sense in a first draft, but you better have it by the end.

Writing for television has helped me so much. In television, you have a beginning, a middle, and an end. There is a beginning, a middle, and an end to the show, the series, the season, the episode, and each scene.

It's a journey and in every piece of it, you're moving. By the end of each scene, you know something more than you knew at the beginning of that scene. That's what makes writing good because that's what makes your reader need to turn the page or keep clicking.

Character is another huge part of it. You have to be able to step outside of them. In the beginning the characters are going to be you and the people around you. They're always going to be pieces of you, because you're writing them, so there is no getting away from that. You've got to understand why the character is behaving the way they are.

You're not going to know what comes next without understanding who your character is, and that's when you get stuck. Writer's block oftentimes means you're not clear what you're writing.

Omega: Do you have any writing rituals?

Tracy: I write in the morning. I wake up in the morning and first thing I just start writing. That's what I like to do the most.

I prefer to wake up early, at 6 a.m. or so, and do my Nespresso. I try to stay off the Internet. I don't succeed all the time; I usually spend about 15 minutes on the news, depending on what day of the script it is.

I wrote my first book at a coffee place. I was in a different life stage then. I had a young kid and I would have to get him up in the morning and get him off to school. Then I would go between carpool and my job (I was working in TV at the time) and I would find either one hour or two hours, depending on whether I had to drive the carpool. I got a book written in nine months that way.

I also love a deadline. It really helps my process. Sometimes I have to waste one day, partially waste the next day, and then get to work, and freak out. And then it starts to happen. I get that feeling I got with my very first paper in college, which was, "Oh my god, I can't wait to get out of bed."