3 Ways to Find Your Story’s Heat
When working on an essay or memoir, it can be challenging to get to the emotional core of the story. How do we find meaning in the mess of our first drafts? The best way I know is to identify heat — moments of energy, tension, or charge in our writing that signal emotional resonance. Heat is what helps us transform facts into story, and a chronicle of events into a thematically resonant, high-stakes narrative. Here are some tips for finding heat in your drafts:
1. Prompt yourself to dig deeper
After reading through your draft, do a freewrite using the prompts below. These are designed to push you to dig deeper into the emotional heart & stakes of your story:
What I really want to say here is…
What I want to say but wouldn’t dare to is…
What most haunts me / interests me about all this is…
2. Highlight moments of heat
Go through your pages and highlight (either by hand or computer) paragraphs, sentences, and words that have “heat” for you, where you feel the most energy, tension, or emotional charge. Then, collect these moments in a Word Document and ask yourself:
What do these moments have in common?
What themes are rising to the surface here?
What are the main sources of tension?
3. Get outside eyes
Share your pages with a fellow writer or an editor and ask them to mark where they feel heat. Where did they feel the most emotional resonance? What themes came through the strongest, and where? Where did they feel the most tension? This will help guide how you convey the themes and stakes to readers in revision.