Have you ever got caught up in a novel that seemed so rich in detail, so real, that you thought for certain the author must have lived that experience?
I mean, we know we’re reading a novel, which, by definition, is fiction. Yet how come a scene or a character will resonate so thoroughly that you find yourself wondering about the author’s real life? Surely an author who can write with such emotion, such clarity, must have experienced what his/her character is going through? Or at the very least, they must share a lot of the same traits as their character.
As a reader, I’m not immune to such thoughts. But as a writer, I cringe. I’ve come across my share of people who have wondered if some of the plots or characters in my novels are actual glimpses into my real life. Friends have turned the pages of my books, looking for signs of themselves. Could that character be ME she’s writing about?
The answer is no. Mostly. This is the tricky part, because parts of my characters do resemble people I know in real life, and some of my characters’ experiences have come, in part, from my own or from those close to me. But not an entire book’s worth or even a chapter’s worth, and certainly not an entire character. What we take from our real life are little threads we weave like expert spinners into the very cloth of our fictitious stories and the people living them.
I spent almost 30 years as a journalist, writing about real people and real events. As fascinating (and sometimes painful) as all of that was, I don’t want to relive my life in my novels. I don’t want to write nonfiction anymore. Truthfully, it is much more fun for me these days to write about the imaginary, the unseen. It’s magical to imagine a different life, to build characters out of nothing but a vision in your head. I mean, how cool is that?
But there are definitely people and events from my past sprinkled like so much fairy dust in my writing. The guy I spoke with a long time ago who described crashing his own plane and how that felt? In one of my novels. Witnessing a surgeon have to tell the patient’s loved one that they didn’t survive the surgery? In one of my books. What it’s like to fall in love? All in my books…of course! Your experiences, the people you have met…these are a treasure trove to inform your fiction.
Even though your fiction writing all starts with your imagination, draw on your own life and the lives of people you know to give that scene or that character in your book more depth, more emotion, more authenticity. And if anyone asks you if what you’ve written is about your own life (or theirs!), deny the heck out of it.
