I want to take a break from giving my usual, highly practical writing advice and tell you a story about a breakthrough I had yesterday in my writing. It's writing outside and I'm sitting by my window with my coffee to keep me warm. So a story time today. I wanted to share this story with you because this breakthrough occurred on the most difficult part of my memoir that I've been writing. And it's part of my memoir that I've been avoiding probably for several months just because I was so anxious and nervous about writing this particular part of my memoir. Maybe you're coming up upon a difficult part in your own writing. Maybe you've been avoiding some part of your writing just like me. And I hope you take away something from this video that will help you to be able to write through that difficult part in your story. Let's go back to 2011 first. My wife and I just found out that our son was diagnosed with autism. And a couple months later, my wife suggested I start a blog to write about what I was learning about our son and autism, to write about what I was learning about myself as a dad. And what I found I mostly wrote about was just taking adventures with my son going different places. I'm now on chapter 6 of my memoir. I have about 26 scenes that have revised and polished. That means I've written about 30 to 35,000 words. I have a long way to go. But the most important thing is I've been learning a lot about being a dad and in writing through writing my memoir. A lot of the scenes I've written have revised hundreds of times just to get them the way I want them. But I've also revised them so many times because I think I was getting nervous and anxious about this difficult part of my memoir that was coming up. And so by revising and editing, that was a way to avoid actually writing this difficult part of my memoir. I realized I just had to go through this difficult part of my memoir. I just had to write through it and go through this difficult part. Even if I was scared, even if I was nervous, even if I didn't think or feel that I could succeed at it, I just need to somehow grit my teeth and try to go through this difficult part of my writing and just see if I could get to the other side. Then I had an epiphany or a crazy idea. The difficult part I was facing is when my wife was learning about this little known part of the autism spectrum called pathological demand avoidance or pdf for short. It's diagnosed only in England. And so my crazy idea is that I would write about it the way I discovered it, which is through a YouTube video where my wife was showing me a video from a YouTuber named Harry Thompson and we watched it together. And my goal was to see if I could turn Harry Thompson, a YouTuber, into a character in my memoir and to write about it in kind of a journalistic style way where I use direct quotes and paraphrase from Harry Thompson and to try to write about it in a way where I show how I'm learning about pdf to kind of recreate with the reader the experience that I went through so they can hear from Harry Thompson himself exactly his story with pdf and what pdf is. If that makes any sense. And I made sure to put my wife and myself in the story by describing how we were sitting on the living room sofa, the leather sofa, and how we had headphones on and they were plugged into a splitter jack and how my wife had paws and we stopped and talked about a part of the video. I finished my first draft of the scene and I was really surprised how well it went. Just using the exact words of Harry Thompson in my writing and paraphrases of what he said and trying to recreate my experience of learning about pdf to allow the reader to go through the same experiences I did through show not tell narrative style writing. On my second draft I added little details to show how watching the video felt like an interaction, kind of like a conversation between Harry and me by adding lines like he looked directly into the camera or he continues his thought. That way it read more like a memoir instead of a journalism story and I made sure the scene flowed smoothly and I cut any parts that didn't really add to the scene or have any fire in them. Most importantly what I tried to do in this scene is just to let Harry Thompson speak to allow him to have the stage so to speak. The reason why I did this is not just to share how I learned about pdf but one of the reasons why I was having difficulty writing this part of my memoir is I have a really limited knowledge or experience with pdf so I thought it would be much better to allow Harry Thompson to speak because he's had pdf for 24 years and he can describe it in much more precise description than I would if I tried to in my feeble effort to attempt to describe pdf. The lesson I learned from this whole experience of this breakthrough in my writing is to think a little bit bigger about who can be a character in a memoir and to find creative ways to integrate them into your story. I think what I ended up with was the kind of a combination of a memoir novel and journalistic writing style that really worked to describe what pdf is in this scene. I want to end this video by encouraging you to push through those difficult parts in your writing. I think what I learned from my breakthrough is that you just have to learn how to write through and just decide and determine that you're going to go through those difficult parts and just try to write through them. No matter what you're feeling, just believe and just try to write through the hard parts. That's my whole aim in this channel. I want to inspire you to keep writing and give you practical advice on how to improve as a writer. Don't forget to click the subscribe button if you want to get more videos like this.