Summer has a way of bringing old memories to the surface. Family reunions, vacations, hometown visits, and long conversations on front porches often remind us of experiences we haven’t thought about in years. Sometimes those memories are pleasant. Sometimes they leave us wondering why certain moments still carry so much emotional weight.
Those experiences quietly shape our assumptions, fears, habits, and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. Whether you’re a writer looking to create richer characters or simply someone trying to better understand a current challenge, this week’s blog and exercise can help uncover the hidden stories that may still be influencing your life today.
Enjoy the exercise and consider sharing your memory and insights at our upcoming free writing webinar on Monday, Jun 15. We’ll explore how memories and the stories we tell ourselves influence our creativity, our writing, and our lives.
I hope you’ll join us.
Here’s to your personal success,
Professor Marilyn Horowitz
The Formative Event for Screenwriting and for Life
Writers are often told to use personal experience to deepen their work. This is good advice, but it is usually delivered in the same way people tell you to drink more water: accurate, mildly annoying, and not especially useful until someone shows you how.
In screenwriting, one of the most powerful tools for deepening a character is to write about their formative event: the early experience that shapes the character’s assumptions, fears, longings, and private logic. It is not merely backstory. It is the emotional blueprint. In The Silence of the Lambs, for example, Clarice Starling’s memory of the spring lambs gives the story its title, its wound, and its moral engine.
The same principle applies to real life. Each of us carries formative events that silently organize our choices. Some are dramatic. Some appear ordinary until we look at them again. A formative event may not explain everything, but it often explains the strange little loop we keep walking around while pretending we are heading somewhere new.
The purpose of the Formative Event Exercise is simple: to take a current dilemma and trace it back to a memory that still has charge. Once the memory is written down and examined, it often reveals the hidden story we have been obeying. Then we can decide whether that story is still useful, or whether it has been bossing us around long enough. It works both as a tool for creative writing and also for inner work.
How to Use a Simple Writing Exercise to Clarify Personal or Business Dilemmas
Much has been said about using writing to improve one’s life, and I agree with most of it. The trouble is that the advice is often too general. “Journal about it” can be helpful, but it can also leave a person staring at a blank page, wondering whether buying a nicer pen counts as healing.
For writers, writing is a craft. For non-writers, writing can be something even more immediate: a practical tool for clarity. It can help solve a problem, identify a painful emotion, or reveal the personal story operating beneath a current situation. The goal is not literary achievement. The goal is contact.
I have spent decades as a writer, writing teacher, writing coach, and filmmaker, helping writers solve story problems. Over time, I learned that many story problems are also life problems wearing a better hat. A character is stuck because the writer does not yet know the formative event. A person is stuck for much the same reason. We suffer when we do not know what story we are living inside.
A Tango Example
Years ago, I took tango lessons. Tango is a beautiful dance and a quick way to discover that your body has been keeping a private list of your emotional habits. I went in thinking I was learning steps. Naturally. This is what the mind likes to believe. The mind loves a sequence. It adores instructions. It would rather count to eight than admit it is terrified of being led.
In tango, the follower cannot move ahead of the lead. Nor can the leader simply drag another person around the floor and call it dancing, though many have tried. Real tango requires listening through the body. It asks for attention, timing, trust, and a willingness to stay present when the next step is not yet visible.
At one lesson, I found myself anticipating the movement before it arrived. I was not following the lead; I was guessing the future. This will surprise no one who has ever met a human being. The teacher stopped me and said, in effect, “You are not waiting. You are deciding before you have received the information.”
That small correction landed with force. On the surface, it was about dancing. Underneath, it was about life. I realized how often I had tried to solve a situation before fully receiving it. I was not responding to what was actually happening. I was responding to what I feared would happen, what I expected would happen, or what had happened before. Very efficient. Also useless.
That moment became a formative event because it exposed a pattern: the attempt to stay safe by getting ahead of the music. In tango, that ruins the dance. In life, it ruins the story. You cannot discover the truth of a moment if you have already written the ending out of fear.
Why This Matters
A Zen master once wrote, “While pain is necessary, suffering is optional.” I used to ponder that in terms of my students and myself. The answer I kept returning to was this: we suffer when we do not know what we want to do or say. More precisely, we suffer when we are reacting to an old story instead of perceiving the present moment.
Without a way to shape the stories of our lives as we currently know them, we remain vulnerable to assumptions and fears left over from the past. These assumptions include cultural attitudes, self-worth assessments, expectations around love and success, and the private verdicts we formed long before we had enough information to make a fair ruling.
The Formative Event Exercise helps us slow down and ask: What is the story I have been living? Where did it begin? What did I decide about myself, other people, or the world? And is that decision still true?
How to Complete the Formative Event Exercise
First, identify the issue or problem you want to work on. Choose something current and specific: a business dilemma, a relationship pattern, a creative block, a money fear, a health habit, or an emotional reaction that feels larger than the situation seems to warrant.
Next, close your eyes and ask yourself for an early memory connected to the issue. Do not try to select the “right” memory. The first image or scene that appears is often the most useful. The unconscious is not a filing cabinet. It is more like a raccoon with a flashlight. Let it show you what it found.
Once you have the memory, set a timer for 15 minutes and write about the event. Do not worry about writing well. This is not a performance. This is fieldwork. Put down what happened, who was there, what you wanted, what you felt, what you decided, and what still bothers you.
After you write, reread what you have written and apply the five W’s: who, what, where, when, and why. Then add the most important question: What story did I begin telling myself because of this event?
Finally, connect the past to the present. Ask how that old story may be shaping your current dilemma. Then ask what you would choose now if you were no longer required to obey the original conclusion.
Applying the Tango Example
Using the tango memory, the current problem might be uncertainty, overthinking, or the habit of trying to control outcomes before enough information has arrived. The formative event is the lesson in which I was told I was moving before I had received the lead.
The five W’s clarify the pattern. Who was involved? The student, the teacher, and the partner. What happened? I anticipated instead of listening. Where did it happen? On the dance floor, where the body tells the truth before the mind has finished its press release. When did it happen? During a lesson, in the middle of trying to improve. Why did it matter? Because the correction revealed a larger habit: trying to stay safe by getting ahead of the moment.
The insight is not “I am bad at tango,” which would be both depressing and unhelpful. The insight is: when I feel uncertain, I may try to replace listening with prediction. Once I see that pattern, I can practice something different. I can pause. I can receive the information. I can allow the next step to emerge.
That is the value of a formative event. It gives us a concrete scene instead of a vague mood. A vague mood is hard to change. A scene can be examined. A scene has characters, action, stakes, and meaning. Once we understand the meaning we assigned to it, we can revise the story.
Using Story as a Problem-Solving Tool
If everyone were taught to make stories out of moments in their lives as a problem-solving tool, they could more easily take stock of the present, plan for the future, and resolve immediate dilemmas. We are already storytellers. The question is whether we are telling the story consciously or letting an old scene whisper instructions from the basement.
Writing the formative event does not erase pain. It does something more practical. It gives pain a structure. Once a painful memory has structure, it becomes workable. It becomes a story we can understand rather than a sensation we keep avoiding.
This is why the exercise is useful for both writers and non-writers. Writers can use it to create richer characters. Anyone can use it to understand the emotional logic behind a current problem. The page becomes a dance floor. The question is not whether we know every step in advance. The question is whether we are willing to listen before we move.
Conclusion
The Formative Event Exercise allows us to work concretely on a problem by looking at it through a specific memory. It can reveal the hidden assumptions that are helping or hindering us. It can show us where we began confusing prediction with wisdom, control with safety, or old fear with present truth.
The point is not to blame the past. The point is to stop taking dictation from it. When we write the formative event, we begin to see the story clearly. And once we see the story clearly, we can decide what happens next.
Start Writing Now!
Monday, June 15, 7:00 pm EST
Whether you’ve been carrying a story for years without writing a page, or you’re a seasoned writer stuck circling the runway, the hardest words are often the first ones.
In this inspiring, down-to-earth webinar, I’ll share techniques to quiet the inner noise, loosen perfectionism’s grip, and help you enter a creative state where writing no longer feels forced and starts to flow.
“The biggest struggle is getting words from my heart to the paper… and suddenly, I could write.” ~ first-time webinar participant
You’ll leave with practical tools to help you:
- Start writing more easily.
- Connect more deeply to your creativity
- Reduce overwhelm and self-judgment
- Develop ideas into structured scenes and pages
- Create a calmer, more productive writing practice
No matter where you are in your writing journey, this webinar is designed to help you finally get your pen to paper.
Don’t miss it! Reserve your spot now.
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