It started as an ordinary conversation with my daughter—two writers comparing notes about the strange things that happen when imagination meets the body. I told her about Aliriani, a character who’d introduced herself to me, and later, shaken me more than any other. Writing her story had left me trembling, hollowed out, raw in a way I didn’t expect. I used the word traumatized, half joking, half serious.
She was surprised. “Don’t you always feel what your characters are feeling?” she asked.
I laughed. “Not like that — not unless I’m writing memoir.”
She writes best-selling romance, where sinking into the emotion on the page is the lifeblood of her craft. Every heartbeat, every confession, every moment of longing — her stories pulse with that intensity. For her, feeling deeply isn’t an occupational hazard; it’s the point.
“That’s why I write,” she said simply. “To feel what my characters feel.”
Her words stayed with me long after the call ended. They shimmered around the edges of memory, tugging at something older.
Because I don’t write to feel.
I write to know.
When I create, I’m listening more than emoting—attuning myself to what the story wants to reveal. Sometimes there’s a glimmer of emotion, a quiet resonance.
Like guilt while shaping The Australian.
Or tenderness while writing and rewriting My Bones.
More often though, its recognition, or dredging a memory to colour my characters with.
The feelings pass through — they don’t consume me like they did with Aliriani. I’m the witness, the translator, taking notes as each truth unfolds.
But with Aliriani, that boundary dissolved. The feeling wasn’t theatrical. I didn’t invent it. It felt more like an embodied, cellular memory surfacing from another lifetime. It bypassed my imagination and went straight to my marrow. It wasn’t empathy. It felt more like transmission. And that transmission shook me.
And that’s the moment my daughter’s comment illuminated something vital: writers learn the same craft — words, scenes, characters — but then travel to different depths.
For different reasons.
Some dive in to experience the emotion; others sink in to understand it.
While hers is the art of the heart’s climax; mine is more like an archaeology of soul.
Realising this deepened something in me. I saw suddenly how intuition shapes my storytelling. My characters come alive because I don’t manufacture their feelings. Instead, I listen until their truth — their story surfaces. Unlike my daughter, what I feel isn’t a character’s sorrow or joy — it’s recognition when their story and mine briefly overlap.
And that’s the centre I write from.
Later, recounting the exchange to a friend, a moment of insight bubbled to the surface.
My daughter writes to feel alive in the emotion.
I write to translate into words what life has already taught me.
Together, we form part of a creative inheritance — two women tracing the same human map but from different directions.
That conversation reminded me why I call this body of work Writing My Bones.
It’s about noticing how ordinary exchanges reveal extraordinary insight. A simple question — “Don’t you always feel what your characters feel?”—became a mirror, showing me how I meet the world through story: not to be absorbed by it, but to stand inside the knowing that feeling leaves behind.
Christine Writer 