For me it was a piece that I wrote in a 1st year university paper called 'Telling the Story' This paper was a cross between creative writing and techniques for analyzing contemporary fiction.

We had an assignment to produce 4 pieces of writing by a certain date and I was struggling to get my final piece written. On the morning of the last day I sat down at a computer at university and decided to do what my tutor had described as life writing. this was to take an emotion or event that was occuring at the time and just write.

Anyway I sat down to start writing and tried to find an emotion in my life that I could write about. I sat and sat and started writing about how my life felt emotionless. I recalled events in my life that should have been high or low points, but the memory of which had been systemastically stripped of emotion. I described the first time I kissed girlfriend and how I could remember the mechanics and the situation that led up to this kiss, but all semblance of emtion was gone. I went on to describe how I felt difficult to know if what i remembered was true or ever really meant anything to me.

The piece ended up being only a page long, but as I read it back, and tweeked the grammar, I felt that this was enough. The PIece struck me with a sense longing for something that I wasn't really sure existed. The comments from the lecturer came back that it was a very powerful but sad piece.

I still remember it to this day as it really did describe my life at the time. I had recently left home and was flatting while at university. I was doing somethings I knew I really shouldn't be doing and I felt very empty inside. I could give all the appearance af a normal life, but nothing of real value seemed to stick. This was a very cathartic piece to write and I think was a step towards coming out of this slump.

I am not sure what ever happened to the piece, but if I ever found it I would love to post it on here to get some comments.

It would I suppose be considered fan-fiction as I borrowed some of my characters from a fairly well known band. Anyway, the main character is a young woman who sings lead for an entirely fictional band. She, her band and a friends band are all playing this festival tour and it opens with her being dragged into the camp of this well known band. Two of its members are ecstatic about showing a third member her tatoo.

From here I split into two story lines the first is the present story where many questions are asked about this particular tatoo. For a visual this tatoo is like a ribbon wrapped around her body with angels depicted on the upper part with clouds and then smoke and flames and then demons as the tattoo goes lower. The main character doesn't want to answer alot of these questions and so the story follows with the two bands making friends and having fun with questions about the tatoo and the person who did it continually popping up.

The second story line is presented through a series of flashbacks. It explains how the tattoo was done by the MC's former boyfriend and the entire story climaxes with the tragic ending to that relationship.

It tells how this girl is dealing with all of the emotions from this relationship and how she's moving on.

I knew for sure I'd done something powerful when my dear friend tugged at my sleeve as she was reading it. Tears were streaming down her face.

It was all a really very intuitive story. I had done my research and just wrote the thing (in less than two days), just doing my job of telling a story. I wasn't really thinking about the deeper meanings and nuances, but they came out anyway--they emerged naturally from my own experiences, knowledge, and sense of the characters. It was only later, as the story was being discussed in the group, that I became aware of some of the powerful moments that came out of the story.

There are other things I've reread that have made me tear up, but that's usually because when I was writing it I pushed through the emotion of it, and later was discovering that it WORKED, or I was actually at the same pitch with my characters sympathetically.