From Personal Experience To Fiction With "The Big Sick"

Emily V. Gordon, one of the screenwriters for the movie The Big Sick, which I haven't seen, wrote an excellent article on bringing her and her husband's personal experience into her writing. It's not unusual to see fiction writers being advised to study books on film writing, and I think her essay is a fine piece for fiction writers also. Personal essay writers might want to take a look at it, too.

Two points:

• How do you make a personal experience universal? 
• A personal experience expresses something in real life that it may not express on the page.