Transformative Experience
The process of writing is a transformative experience. You transform your thoughts—your information, knowledge, and wisdom—into words, and in the process you express the meaning that you have found in your experience.
You transform the story itself as you sink into it, writing in your journal, revising, redrafting, teasing out the one thing that the story is about.
Often, a transformative experience is also the thing that you are most eager to write about, a moment when you changed. Maybe it was a point of decision when you (or some fictional character) decided to go climb a mountain or never to go skiing again. Maybe it was a moment when your feelings or beliefs changed—the moment when you fell in love or came to believe that war is wrong.
Reading, too, is a transformative experience.
Reading can lead to action. After reading your editorial, a reader may leap up from her chair and go join a picket line protesting a subway fare increase.
But reading is often a more subtle transformative experience. “I never thought of that,” one reader may think. Or “Until I read this story, I misjudged motorcycle riders and pit bulls, too.”
Writing is probably most effective when it is a transformative experience for both you and your reader—when you both learn something new, see the world and your lives in a new way.