Are We Too “Domesticated” to Write Great Stories?

Are we too “domesticated” to write truly great stories? This might seem like an odd question, but bear with me. I’ve been incredibly blessed over the course of my life to travel all over the world. While I did get to check out some of the resorts, my favorite travel stories seem to always involve places no one in their right mind would go…on purpose.

Note I DID qualify with “in their right mind.”

Like the time I lived in Syria, went out into the desert to look at ruins but failed to pack enough water *face palm*. This ancient Bedouin shuffled past me wearing a huge glass bottle full of water…that he was selling by the sip.

I have no shame.

I bought the WHOLE BOTTLE.

Or when I was on the Mexican border and had to go to the ladies’ room. As I am sitting there…a chicken just walks in and decides to be my friend. Still funny.

In the jungles of Belize, I spent all day wielding a sledgehammer to pull up a sidewalk at a school (humanitarian mission). The entire day it rained on me. I spent seven hours slogging through mud in the rain carrying buckets of cement, ripping up rebar, and patrolling—machete in hand—for snakes.

End of the day? All I wanted was a shower. I strip down to everything but my seriously stupid lime green flip flips with big goofy flowers on the toes, turn on the water…and SCORPIONS RAIN DOWN OUT OF THE SHOWER CURTAIN.

Apparently goofy flower flip flops make an excellent weapon.

Why are these some of my favorite stories? Especially since none of them cast me in a particularly good light. Whether it is me being too dumb to pack WATER in the SYRIAN DESERT or naive enough to not watch for SCORPIONS in a JUNGLE, there is a common thread.

I was far too domesticated.

Domesticated Writers

There is a strange cognitive distortion we can all experience being a part of First World living. We really don’t know what it is like to worry about most of that really important stuff at the base of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

I mean FOOD? Me? Hunt? *hair flip* I don’t even know how to track tacos. Are burritos migratory? Do pizzas travel in packs?

***If you know, please answer in the comments.

Please understand. I am seriously grateful that I am an American, that I live in a wonderful country and enjoy incredible blessings. Yet, how often do we take these blessings for granted? How much can modern life lull us into a form of sensory sleepwalking that make our writing come across as dull, colorless or inauthentic?

Case in point.

One of my favorite classes to teach was Beyond Bulletproof Barbie. This class covered combatives (various forms of martial arts), guns (everything from pistols to long arms), and bladed weapons. I enjoy teaching it because, while I “get” we write fiction and can’t be 100% accurate, a handful of really great details truly enhances authenticity.

When reading any fight scene, I can almost instantly tell a writer who has a) never been punched or b) has never thrown a punch.

How?

Easy.

Punching suuuucks. I know! News flash. Either way. Honestly. Sucks to be puncher or punch-ee. And I get that it is easy to believe the person doing the punching gets the better of it but no. FUN FACT! Unless one is a professional fighter, odds are pretty good you will break or dislocate something in your hand.

Am I suggesting we start Writer Fight Club? No…because I can’t talk about Writer Fight Club. Also, pain sucks. But, I do believe the answer is simpler.

Domesticated Distortion

Sometimes, just recognizing we have a blind spot is a great start. This is where, first of all, being a prolific reader will be seriously helpful. We can only do and experience so much, so why not rely on the experiences of others? The more we read, the deeper creative well we draw from.

I have no idea what it is like to live in the aftermath of a war (and pray I never do). But I can read works from people who have. I’m not a man, a child, a space alien, a battle hardened Marine, or a geriatric, but I can be all those things because I can use empathy and imagination. That said, empathy and imagination, like other writing muscles, need strength training.

If we believe we might be too domesticated, then how might we ratchet up the story intensity? I recommend practicing deep empathy. Try writing in Deep POV.

Refer to: Deep POV: What IS It & Why Do Readers LOVE It So Much?

Deep POV is not only a fantastic way to hook readers into the story experience at a whole other—visceral—level, but it will also help us be aware of our domesticated blind spots.

Try doing some short writing pieces on the same topic. Same story prompt but from as many different POVs as you can think of. Maybe change the setting, too.

Most of us tend to—at least in the beginning—write as ourselves. Hey, I did it! Still do. When they say “write what you know” then this is kind of a “no duh” thing right?

But can you take a story prompt then write from the perspective of someone who is NOT you? Empathy is a fantastic skill in life and in writing.

Experience Informs Perspective

domesticated, quicksand meme, funny

We can take a simple scenario and do a fun thought experiment/writing exercise. Take our domesticated brains into a domesticated situation that suddenly is anything BUT.

There is a bodega on the corner of a major city. It’s late at night. There is an Uber driver, an elderly person, a young mother, and a juvenile delinquent. Someone decides to rob the bodega.

Who is it? How do the others react? Who “saves” the day? Should it have been “saved” at all? Are things not as they might appear? Do we end up with an unlikely hero? An unintended tragedy?

Could you write the story where each person is the robber and make us empathize with their motives? Note I said we had to empathize not agree. That is an important distinction. In life, we are all good, law-abiding citizens so cognitive dissonance like this stretches our brain muscles.

The key to having a reader empathize is to show who the character is and relay their why (motive).

Under normal circumstances, robbing a bodega is unacceptable. But great stories leave normal in the dust. Additionally, those around react correspondingly using their frame of reference and life experiences. They can help ratchet the tension in the story.

Say our would-be robber is the Uber driver. A half hour earlier, he picked up the Ride from Hell. Unfortunately for him, his fare took a page out of the noir classic Collateral and our poor Uber driver is actually a hostage, himself.

He has to hit a certain number of bodegas before midnight or his family will die.

That’s already a bad night, but what if the senior citizen is an ex-Green Beret and decides to be a hero? What if the teenager is actually a twenty-eight-year-old Vice officer? Or the young mother is actually part of the cartel and was there to collect extortion money from the owner?

What if the cashier just found out his wife was leaving him for his brother and they’d emptied all his savings. All he has left is this crappy job and he just can’t be pushed one…more…step.

We can make these people as benign or interesting as we want. There are plenty of everyday people who do extraordinary things—good and bad—with the right lever. Conversely, there are plenty of folks walking around who seem ordinary at first glance but are anything BUT.

Eg. Spies never look like spies unless it’s the movies.

Psst, neither do aliens.

This is where fiction becomes FUN.

Domesticated Imaginations

domesticated, meme, To Do List

I know what it is like to get caught up in the humdrum of life. Whether it is the day job, the WIP that we have been working on for months, life, family, health issues. We can forget how important it is to shove ourselves out of our comfort zone to knock the dust off our imaginations.

Maybe you can do this in your own WIP. If you are stuck, pull out a supporting character and write an experience from their POV. When in a scene, think from all angles. Sight is the weakest of all the senses yet writers (in my experience) rely on it too much. Can we see if we can put ourselves even deeper into the scene? FEEL the cold, TASTE the heat, SENSE the danger?

What Are Your Thoughts?

I know I was suffering from being too domesticated. After working from home for almost twenty years, I took a temporary job in November to get out of the house. You know you’ve been working at home too many years when you eat your lunch like you just served a dime in the pen.

It’s been a lot of fun and has gotten me out of my comfort zone, but the schedule has been a mess trying to fit it with homeschooling and other work. FINALLY it seems to be leveling off. I’ve been working in fashion marketing and the holidays was just BONKERS crazy and January is the start of a whole new year and and and and. LIFE.

BUT it really did show me how many experiences I’d forgotten about working on my own with only my imaginary friends to bug me. VERY different being in a corporate setting.

But I am still here. Still weird. Weirder by the day. So any of y’all have tips on hunting those burritos?

What are our thoughts? Do you think maybe you hold back too much in your work sometimes? Maybe you could push a little harder but have gotten out of the habit?

Also, feel free to drop a try at the bodega story in the comments. I always love seeing y’all show off!

12 comments

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  1. I agree wholeheartedly with your analysis of the perhaps overly pampered life that so many Americans have. Experiencing unusual, uncomfortable, or other kinds of challenges do broaden our outlook and perspective. As you point out, we don’t have to slog through mosquito-filled swamps to create the experience in our writing, if we’re bright enough to talk to someone who has. With regards to giving or receiving punches, I haven’t done so, but I wrote about a fist-fight in my second novel, and included a few details about the main character, feeling prickling above one eye from where his opponent landed one, and tingling, incremental “puffs” of swelling in his hand as he talks with the responding police officer. So much can be filled out if the writer considers seriously how he or she would feel – physically, mentally, emotionally – in that situation.

    I recently edited a novel in which the main character hits a deer in the road. The author described very little of the character’s physical discomfort after the fact, so I recommended adding things like his chest being very sore (at best!) from having rammed into the steering wheel, his legs being very wobbly when he tried to get out of the car to assess the situation, etc. I’ve never hit a deer and suffered the consequences, but I imagined the realistic physical aspects of what that would be like. She liked my recommendations and incorporated them.

    This is sort of a “walk a mile in my shoes” way of looking at the details we include.

    • rogernay on January 31, 2025 at 10:20 pm
    • Reply

    I always enjoy your posts, thought provoking and sometimes weird. Truth is, I would have been with you looking at ruins in the desert without sufficient water.

    1. Weird is good …

    2. I understand the foray into the desert with not enough water. Although nowhere near the same experience, I visited Herakleion in Turkey. It was a very hot day and we hadn’t taken enough water.
      Stupid, I hindsight, really.

        • rogernay on February 2, 2025 at 10:01 am
        • Reply

        I spent three hours touring Pompeii on a warm October day last fall, but they have a concessions stand.

  2. This post is perfect timing for me as I’m about to dive back into writing. I’ve noticed that “not writing” and “not reading” always happen at the same time for me, usually because I’m grieving and using every distraction I can to keep from thinking. Too much Netflix, too many homemaking projects, too much merging stuff on my tablet = zero inspiration and creativity. It’s time to get weird again. Thanks for the reminder! Also, I can’t wait to follow the link to your Deep POV post. I geeked out on it for a while a few years ago and need a refresher.

    • Suzanne Lucero on February 1, 2025 at 11:02 pm
    • Reply

    Speaking of bodegas, I follow @bodegacats.bsky.social on Bluesky. Just pictures of cats being cats in a bodega. No text. If you’re over there, give them a follow. ?

    • Rachel C Thompson on February 2, 2025 at 9:13 am
    • Reply

    I rode the construct career rollercoaster 25 years and made a ton of money and lost it all several times before coming out late in life whereby I lost everything again to the point of homelessness. I surfed the manic wave until I shattered resulting in me being diagnosed as bipolar. After getting on my feet following years of hospitalizations, torments and rejections, I crashed a motorcycle, got run over by a truck and was set on fire. I don’t use any of that in my work. I prefer to laugh at it. Kurt Vonnegut showed me the way. So, I write a lot of satire via sci-fi among other things. The smell of my flesh burning doesn’t work for me. I write visceral details, sure, but the horrors and struggles of survival isn’t entertaining or interesting to me. I write what makes me laugh and overrides pain while speaking truth. I write satire for me and others who rather laugh. I’ve never been domesticated but I have been poor and rich and poor again. I get what you are saying, Kristine, but in my case, domestication is working for me. I’ve never experienced a settled, predictable life until recently. I can’t trust it. To see one of my wacky short stories for free go to my crappy website. rcthom.com This is what my formally unstable life produces.

    1. Rachel, I believe this is what makes the world whole: people like you who have “been there, done that,” gone through thick and thin, and don’t give a damn about what others may think about your take on life, be it crude or exquisite. Nobody has the authority to dictate to you how you choose to express yourself, to share your story. Those who don’t like it can let you be. Those who do will appreciate your sharing (and probably learn something from it). And at this point, it sounds like you’ve earned the peace and quiet of domesticity.

      1. Amen!

    • C. Love on February 3, 2025 at 11:18 am
    • Reply

    I would share my bodega story, but you already used my best ideas in your post 😉

  3. When I’m not writing, I work in appliance sales and repair. I find it both humorous and annoying when customers think it’s an emergency when their dishwasher or icemaker is not working. It makes me think, “We’re not going to make it, are we?”

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