title: Writing With A Heavy Heart: Using Grief and Loss to Stretch Your Fiction
author:  Denise Jaden 
description: "Jaden's Writing With A Heavy Heart is a must-have for any writer's craft shelf. The combination of clear guidance and practical exercises allow writers to take their manuscripts to a deeper level."<br />- Eileen Cook Author of Unraveling Isobel and The Almost Truth<span></span><br /><br /><span>"</span><span>Writing With A Heavy Heart absolutely nails the grieving process. I love the exercises included, because, to me, they make the whole thing a tangible help in applying it to a work in progress."<br />- Janet Gurtler, author of If I Tell and Who I Kissed</span><br /><br /><span>"Writing With A Heavy Heart has a lot of really good insights on grief and suggestions on how to incorporate them to fiction."<br />- Lee Strauss, author of The Perception Series</span><br /><br /><span>"Jaden's Writing with a Heavy Heart helped me add layers to my characters who experience loss. The tools provided in this piece make it practical in my writing projects."<br />- Cindy Callaghan, author of Just Add Magic and Purses, Palaces and Photographic Proof</span>
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  _For Aaron and Everett_
  
   _In honor, celebration, and memory of Reid_
  
  THIS IS MY story, as I remember it, allowing that time and grief have rendered
  some memories unreachable. Some events have been compressed or reordered;
  conversations have been reconstructed from memory. Passages from my blog and
  social media have been incorporated to stay true to the grief of those
  seasons. Some names have been changed to protect the anonymity of those
  persons, and some have been kept as they are in real life. I acknowledge that
  if your gender, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, experiences, or beliefs are
  different than mine, what is written on these pages might not always resonate.
  If this is true, I say: I see you, your story is important in its differences
  and similarities, and I hope you feel supported by this book as a whole. In
  all ways, I have attempted to honor the roles that the members of my far-
  reaching community have had in my jou