On Emotion and Sentimentality in Writing

I came upon this in my reading recently. It is by the author, Anne Bernays:

"Too many writers avoid their own strongest feelings because they are afraid of them, or because they are afraid of being sentimental. Yet these are the very things that will make beginning work ring true and affect us. Your sotries have to matter to you the writer before they can matter to the reader; your story has to affect you before it can affect us. William Kittredge says, 'If you are not risking sentimentality, you are not close to your inner self.'"

Here's an exercise you might want to do:
Think about what strong feeling you think you would never write about.
Name the feeling, the emotion.
Then begin to write why you are afraid of that emotion.
Then close your eyes and think of an incident in your life where that emotion
seemed to betray you?
Write the memory but in a particular way. First, give the person in your memory/story
a name other than yours. Then tell yourself that you are not telling this story -- your new
character is. Let the character be the opposite sex from you, if you want. Then ask your character to write the memory, but remember -- this is no longer only your memory. It belongs to your character. Let the memory shapeshift however your new character wants it to shapeshift.

Write fiction!