How to Use Fiction to Change Your Story
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I consider myself someone who loves deeply. When I fall in love with someone, there’s no superficiality to it. But I’ve had a habit of falling in love with the wrong people. And by that, I mean I’ve often fallen in love with guys who didn’t return my affection.
As a result, I’ve experienced a lot of unrequited love. In fact, I have more experience with unrequited love than I do with requited love. The only real requited love I’ve experienced—at least romantically—has been through my stories.
Your Story
One thing I’ve discovered about life is that it’s a story. It is true that, unlike in a story you write, you don’t have control over all the factors in life. But you do get to control how you interpret everything—and, thus, the way you tell your story.
For instance, after having experienced so much unrequited love, I could come to the conclusion that I’m unlovable. But I choose not to come to that conclusion. Instead, I choose to say that I just haven’t found the right person yet. I probably still have more work to do on myself before I can attract a partner who’s truly compatible with me.
And when I really think about it, I’ve only met a few of the billions of people on this planet. So, what makes me think the partner for me couldn’t be one of the billions I haven’t yet met?
But when it comes to the way I love, sometimes I think I’ll never find anyone like the guys I’ve already met. And while that may be true, that’s actually a good thing. Maybe I want to meet someone who has some of the wonderful qualities they have, but I also want someone I can actually have a relationship with. And so, I want to meet someone different in that sense.
While I wait to find this person, one thing that can help me to remind myself that I am lovable is to live my life through fictional characters that I create. This isn’t intended to be a way to escape reality. It’s a way to reinforce what I believe to be true—that with the right person, I can enjoy reciprocal love.
So, how can you use fiction to change your story? Here are two ways.
2 Ways You Can Use Fiction to Change Your Story
Create a fictionalized version of yourself and write a story where you get the ending you want.
If you experienced something where the outcome wasn’t what you wanted or desired, you can use fiction to change the ending. In a fictional story, you can create a fictionalized version of yourself and give that version of yourself the ending you desire.
The fictionalized version of you should resemble you in looks and personality, but they can also have certain qualities you don’t have. And then you can use elements from your real-life story to create a fictional story where you change the ending.
This strategy has two benefits. First, it can help to remind you that you are worthy of the outcome you desire. And second, it can allow you to get closure in situations where you didn’t get closure in real life. I actually used this strategy to help me deal with a lack of closure I experienced with certain crushes, and I find that it works wonders. I’ll talk about that story more below.Write stories where what you want to see happen actually happens.
A few years ago, I started writing stories of INFJ unrequited love because I wasn’t seeing many of those kinds of stories anywhere—stories with the intensity of INFJ love where the main character’s feelings aren’t being reciprocated. (If you’re into personality typing, I consider myself an INFJ.) I wanted to write those stories because I wanted to write about what I had experienced myself.
But recently, I’ve decided to change those stories because I want to change my own story. And so, right now, most of those stories have endings where the main character’s love is reciprocated—if not with the person the character was originally crushing on, then with someone else. You can read Guitar Class: Part 1 and Guitar Class: Part 2 to get a sense of what I mean.
But I was actually already doing this kind of thing with screenwriting, which is one of my favorite media for self-expression when it comes to envisioning what I desire. You see, to me, screenwriting is a way to take the movies I see in my head—movies that usually involve reciprocal love—and put them into a cohesive format for myself and others to enjoy.
I’m not entirely sure whether I want to make those scripts into movies someday, but just being able to create my own little movies can be nice. And although I haven’t written a screenplay in a while, I remember feeling a certain thrill and excitement when I create characters who get to experience all the wonder of reciprocal relationships. While I wait for my own real-life love story, I get to experience that wonder through them.
You can do the same through the stories you write. They don’t have to be based on anything specific or anything that actually happened. They can just be you writing down your fantasies and getting to experience your real-life desires through the characters you create while you wait to experience those things in the real world.
A New Love Story
Speaking of changing your story, I actually wrote a novel-length young adult romance called “What Happens After You Confess Your Feelings to Someone?” (This is the story I referenced in #1.) I wrote it to help myself get closure from past crushes—one intense crush in particular. But the characters are all fictionalized and the story itself is fictional.
Even so, it helped me get the closure I was looking for by allowing me—as a fictionalized version of myself—to enjoy a more satisfying ending. But to make the story more fun for readers, I’ll let them decide who they want the main character to end up with.
“What Happens After You Confess Your Feelings to Someone?” is a young adult romance about a high school student named Chloe who’s deeply in love with a boy at her school named Mordecai. But Chloe’s good friend Simon is in love with her. Who will she choose? The reader gets to decide.
Because this isn’t a traditional story, I’ve designed it so that, to read it you’ll need to join the What Happens After You Confess membership. There, you can start reading the main story. And when you reach the chapter where you get to decide what Chloe should do, you can read the chapters that correspond to the outcome you select.
The story is presented as a sequence of blog posts, with one chapter per post. If you’re interested, you can click here to learn more about it.
Final Thoughts
In real life, we don’t always get the endings we want. But by reinforcing these disappointments, we can continue along that same path. Instead, we can use fiction to give us more satisfying endings and to reinforce the life we’re worthy of. And that, in turn, can give us the courage to keep hoping and reaching for what we truly want.
I believe there’s a time and place for expressing how we really feel about something that happened. When it comes to art, I prefer to use poetry and songwriting for this. But there’s also a time and place for expressing what we actually desire. And that’s when changing your story can be very helpful.
~ Ashley C.
Last updated: April 20, 2025