As I've written more, I've realized that the best writing usually requires a kind of painful and scary revealing of the self--of your most tremendous or heartbreaking or secret experiences. Because these things that you can't quite find the words to talk about every day, these are the things you'll write about later. "Later" is the key word. I think it was Wordsworth (maybe Coleridge?) who said something about how poetry is made of emotional recollection. You have to go through something, then you must recreate it. You twist it. You make it fuller of color or make the picture sharper, or maybe cast it in black and white. By doing this reshaping, you disguise it to a certain extent, which is often necessary when talking about something so personal, whatever the subject may be.

So writing. I mean, if you wanted to, I guess you could write about something impersonal and disconnected from yourself. You could describe a flower or something. But I think that even in pure fiction, the author puts forth a huge chunk of him/herself. Anything real requires you to dig deep. To feel again what you felt at the time. But it isn't necessarily dwelling on some event, or some unnecessary nostalgia. It's purging, or it's reaching an understanding. I write almost exclusively for myself, to relive, often.