I understand the value in pulling your own emotional paths that you learn from into your writing, but the limit to this is that we don’t experience everything that we need our characters to. I think the second half of this topic deserves further exploration.

Not only do you not need to, it’s freaking impossible to try and would screw up your life. Research and discuss* the topic(s) enough that you can fake them convincingly. For side details that ought to be enough.

* ie. discuss the topic(s) with people who actually have experienced the thing you’re researching. This gives you a sense of how reality varies from the theory. Use these people as alpha readers too, so that they pick up your obvious errors. For instance, if you’re writing a story about someone who is a veteran, you should give it to someone who’s suffered post-traumatic stress disorder. If you want to write about magic that makes it hard to think clearly, give your manuscript to a schizophrenic. (for common mental illnesses, giving your work to a therapist or counselor of some description is also good) If you have horses in your fantasy novel, find a horse trainer who’ll read your work.

One thing that I might recommend for stretching one’s emotional imagination is – take an acting class. It might not be for everyone but in an acting class one of the things you learn is to put yourself emotionally in the place of a character. It forces you to really understand the character inside and out. You have to work out what they’re thinking and feeling and translate that into the resulting visceral response.

For those of you who are complete nerds like me, you can also do text-based roleplay. It won’t give you the same ability to describe the physical aspects of emotional reaction as learning about and observing good acting will, but if you do well it’s great “voice” and character practice.

Couple that with watching dramatic movies and/or plays and mining them for things you can describe the physical reactions with and you’re golden.

if you everwant to get undepressed with respect to your writing abiliy just go re-read Da Vinci Code, and remember that book is one of the best selling novels of all time.

Unfortunately writing skill is secondary to contraversy and promotion in this world.

I think that is close to what Dan said. I laughed hard at that. I have found cognitive therapy useful in dealing with my depression, and appreciate the reminder to use it more often. All that dribble I write in my journal has a purpose. HUZZAH!

“I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, was to put down what really happened in action: what the actual things were which produced the emotions that you experienced the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things.”

Good luck on your career!