Ever felt like this?

[Leanne]

Do you have any advice for half-baked writers who struggle with not having experienced real sadness in their lives? Who get more depressed by a pulled muscle than the untimely death of ancestors past?
How do they write poetry, whom practically nothing has made aghast?

Make shit up.  That's what I do.  My grandfather is 94 and on his fourth wife, all of whom he has mistreated, but it's a nice fiction that he might have instead been lost in the war and left behind a wife who still cherished his memory.

Focus on the small things.  What might that pulled muscle represent?  Was it your body's way of telling you that wasn't the direction you were supposed to go in?  What might have happened if you'd ignored it and gone anyway?  Or how does your pulled muscle compare to the injuries sustained by a small child who has run afoul of a fragmentation grenade?  

I learned empathy.  It's an intellectual experience.

And yes, I just made it up.  Paul is inspirational .