My writing dilemma

How can you write a story about a near death experience escaping a burning block of flats if you’ve never been trapped inside a fire-engulfed building? You can gain second hand accounts of the trauma, see the scars of the victims; you can even just read about it in the paper. Get the background information and write a story about it with as much accuracy as you can gather. But you can never really get the truth that way, can you? You can’t truly relate to the words on the paper. The words are based on facts rather than feeling – the focus is on making it as believable as possible. This is an extreme case. Thankfully, the majority of us haven’t had to escape a burning block of flats and I would imagine this is an exception to gaining the experience to be able to write about it. But what about love stories? You can’t write your own Romeo and Juliet if you don’t truly know that kind of love exists. Even if you want to believe it does exist, if you once came close to believing it, if you don’t really know, how can you write an honest story about it? Here’s the next one; this is the biggest test I’ve had yet. How can you write a story with a happy ending if you don’t feel you’ve had one of your own yet? Sitting with pen and paper in hand you think up a master plot but when it comes to completing the moral of the story, you find you’ve come unstuck, because you don’t think the outcome would really happen in real life. You power through anyway and force your happy ending, but you don’t really believe it. So again, you’ve written a lie. But you don’t want to write stories about pessimism and what it’s like in the real world. You want to create hope at the end of your story and you want to believe it. The challenge is finding it.