Do you write close to your life, or distant?

[SusanR]

I have a friend, Elizabeth Burns, who wrote a wonderful novel called TILT. She's a published poet, but TILT is her first novel. It's really woven out of her life.

My WIP is not autobiographical at all.

Do you write close, or far, from your real life? Why do you think you made the choice you did?

SusanR

[JerseyGirl1962]

I have a friend, Elizabeth Burns, who wrote a wonderful novel called TILT. She's a published poet, but TILT is her first novel. It's really woven out of her life.

My WIP is not autobiographical at all.

Do you write close, or far, from your real life? Why do you think you made the choice you did?

SusanR

Susan,

Hmmm...hard to say.

I have bits and pieces of myself in a lot of my characters. I also do the same (sometimes without thinking about it) with my husband and his siblings. If you knew the Beck lot, and what I've dubbed "Beck Lore," you'd understand why these weird eccentrics have such a hold on me. :tongue

I wouldn't call my stories autobiographical, but I sometimes take ideas from the aforementioned Beck Lore and twist it, or, as I've done in my current WIP, I take a nearby town that hubby and I frequent and use it as a backdrop to the story.

I've got 2 other novels that work hand-in-hand with this WIP, and I'll have as backdrop certains towns in New Jersey, where I was born and grew up.

So the wishy-washy answer is: kinda sorta close.

~Nancy

[KTC]

I do both. I have to have some elements of self in my work...it's unavoidable. But I also stray far from myself. Whatever I write, I write. If there are parts of me in there, it just happens organically...it's not intentionally put in and it's not intentionally left out.

[Mike Coombes]

My WIP is not autobiographical at all.

It is. you just don't realise it.

-SusanR]Do you write close, or far, from your real life? Why do you think you made the choice you did?

No matter how far, I'm always close. The internal workings of my MC's mind are tainted by my own.

[Jamesaritchie]

I think the best fiction nearly always contains a good deal of autobiography, even if it's set on Mars. If not autobiography, then certainly biography or others.

How close my own fiction is to my real life depends on the story. There are usually strong autobiographical elements in the protagonist, and whenever possible I work things, experiences from my own life into the fiction. Write what you know is very useful. And on occasion I've had stories published as fiction that were 100% autobiography in every detail.

[blacbird]

Write what you know is very useful.

I've always taken "Write what you know" to mean, mainly, "Write what you know about how real people behave." Inevitably, that means to start with knowing how you yourself behave, but it doesn't necessarily imply that you only write autobiography in terms of story, setting and incident. I suspect too many beginning writers think it does.

I'm currently about halfway through (yet another unpublishable) novel, this one set in frontier America of the mid-19th century, involving a trio of con artists forced into an uneasy alliance and fleeing a variety of difficulties on their way west. Now, I've never been a con artist (though I suppose most of the agents I've contacted suspect me of trying to con them), and even the most ungenerous person I know wouldn't accuse me of having lived in the mid-19th Century. But I think I do know something about greed, lust, stupidity, superstition, duty, loyalty, racial prejudice, hatred, pride, vengefulness etc. And those qualities I can apply to characters who are not drawn directly on autobiography.

caw.

[FolkloreFanatic]

To me, "write what you know" means utilizing behavior you've witnessed, and, less often, incorporating settings you've memorized in your head (like bits and pieces from a hometown or the way your university library operates behind the scenes).

Not everyone has been a nurse or a detective, so a bit of research shouldn't stop people from writing about medical thrillers or crime stories. On the other hand, I certainly wouldn't pass up a good chance to write about a job I know well.

All of my characters have pieces of me in them (which is disturbing, because it show me how evil I could be were I so inclined!), but there are plenty of them--like the class president in my college story--who grow up from being shallow and petty within the story arc--and I have to rely on observation of those kind of people from real life, because I've never been that gregarious, even at my best moments.

As for plot and setting, there are only so many stories I can lift from real life as smoothly as I can lift personality quirks (obviously), so the plot arcs rarely have much to do with my personal experiences.

[Jamesaritchie]

To me, "write what you know" means utilizing behavior you've witnessed, and, less often, incorporating settings you've memorized in your head (like bits and pieces from a hometown or the way your university library operates behind the scenes).

Not everyone has been a nurse or a detective, so a bit of research shouldn't stop people from writing about medical thrillers or crime stories. On the other hand, I certainly wouldn't pass up a good chance to write about a job I know well.

.

Write what you know sometimes means using your own experience, and the more experience you have in various areas, the easier it is to write good fiction. One reason many young writers have such trouble getting published is that, while they may write very well, they lack the real world experience that adds verisimilitude to fiction.

But write what you know does mean using behavior you've witnessed, and it also means using expertise you have in one area to write about another, similar area. None of us have been to some distant solar system via spaceship, but it helps to make the characters realistic if you know, or have been, a mechanic, or a police officer, or something else that translates into the job someone on that spaceship might do.

You certainly don't have to have been a detective or a nurse to write about these professions, but if you want to make character in these professions believable, it helps to get to know some real detectives and some real nurses well enough to know how they behave in their job. I think it takes more than a bit of research to get it right, it takes a lot of research, and it takes getting to know some people in these professions.

In the end, "Write what you know" means "If you don't know it, then learn it."

But I do think personal experience is always the best teacher, and whether you're writing science fiction, fantasy, or whatever, the more personal experience you can bring to bear, the better off you are.

[SusanR]

It is. you just don't realise it.



No matter how far, I'm always close. The internal workings of my MC's mind are tainted by my own.

Hmmmmm.

Well, of course the work is crafted within my own mind, so it's made from the stuff of me. But it isn't about me, is what I mean.

In another life, I used to do a bit of acting in theater. I loved the process of crawling around inside a character and bringing her to life, especially when the character was a stretch. Writing is like that, a process of getting intimate with the inside of a personality not one's own. So is doing psychotherapy for that matter.

So yes, one gets intimately close with one's characters, close enough to see with their eyes, feel with their hearts, think their thoughts. But it's still about them, not me.

SusanR

[britlitfantw]

The first novel I finished started as what was, in essence, a story about myself and my best friends (keep in mind, I wasn't doing this to be self-serving, I didn't care if it got published, I just wanted to write it). There were no differences except for the names, and the MC had the exact same history as I had.

As I kept writing it, I found that I had no inspiration for it and, thus, I no longer enjoyed it. So I examined the story, and thought about the story I wanted to tell. That was then the MC formed herself in my mind and I knew that it was her story I wanted to tell, not mine.

She still has several of my experiences, major ones, but they're in her past. They're not part of the plot, just a subplot. And my book became a better story for it; she evolved into someone else, the other characters evolved and, thus, the story evolved.

My characters still, occasionally, have bits of me in them. I like doing that, it's almost like putting an easter egg in a computer game. But I don't do it purposefully. Sometimes, I'll read something I wrote and realize, "Hey, they're a bit like me because ..."

It's an interesting process, really. :)

[aruna]

I have a narrow definition of "autobiographical". To me, it means my own life journey, with at best the dialogue improved, the boring stuff cut out, jazzed up, but, basically, following the course of my own life. That is, I take my life, with all the chonological events, and fictionalise it. I have nor made up any characters, plot developments, etc.

I don't write this way. I make up characters, events, dalogues, story climaxes. However: I do quarry without compunction from my own life and its events and characters. I may take one incident and put it into a story - for instance, my friends and I buying an old horse drawn hearse, painting it bright blue, an ddriving it through the streets. That appeared inone of my novels. As well as the places I've known, peaople I've met. My novels are a mixture of made up characters and those that have been inspired by real people. I'd never want a "real" person to appear inmy books, as I woudl feel the urge to make that character behave as the real person would - that clips my possibilities.
Obviously, itmy own mind is the quarry out of which I reap my stories. What other substance should I use? But that's just the raw material.

[Jamesaritchie]

I have a narrow definition of "autobiographical". To me, it means my own life journey, with at best the dialogue improved, the boring stuff cut out, jazzed up, but, basically, following the course of my own life. That is, I take my life, with all the chonological events, and fictionalise it. I have nor made up any characters, plot developments, etc.

I don't write this way. I make up characters, events, dalogues, story climaxes. However: I do quarry without compunction from my own life and its events and characters. I may take one incident and put it into a story - for instance, my friends and I buying an old horse drawn hearse, painting it bright blue, an ddriving it through the streets. That appeared inone of my novels. As well as the places I've known, peaople I've met. My novels are a mixture of made up characters and those that have been inspired by real people. I'd never want a "real" person to appear inmy books, as I woudl feel the urge to make that character behave as the real person would - that clips my possibilities.
Obviously, itmy own mind is the quarry out of which I reap my stories. What other substance should I use? But that's just the raw material.

Do you really make up characters, or do you piece them together from real people you've known? And when you make up events, aren't these events made more real by using your own life experience in other areas?

[aruna]

Do you really make up characters, or do you piece them together from real people you've known? And when you make up events, aren't these events made more real by using your own life experience in other areas?

No, I don't piece them together. That sounds as if I consciously think of characteristics and "make up" a new character, which I don't do. Instead, they seem to grow from inside me; I "feel" them. In the case of lead characters, I become them. It's hard to describe, but it's definitely not a piecing together of people I've known. Same with events; many, if not most, of these have no connection with my own life. Events I've lived thoruh, or read about, spark many of the fictional events; and many of my own experiences do feed into such fictional events. Many; but certainly not all.

[fallenangelwriter]

My characters don't start out resembling anyone real; sometimes they're based on other fictional people, usually just a hazy image in my mind.


over time, as they become clearer, they tedn toget closer to reality. in particular, my protagonists take on more and more of my traits over time. It's not that i'm deliberately inserting ymself into the story, it's just that i understand how i think, so it's natural to have characters do the same.

[pconsidine]

My characters are usually drawn from single traits of people I know (or myself, I suppose). I then expand them into whole new people. I'd say that's a mix of near and far. The source is near, but the results are very far.

There are also times when some interesting character will occur to me and she will grow completely on her own. For example, the main character of my current WIP is a woman who makes the last meals for death row prisoners. I'm not sure where she came from at all, but through the writing, she has grown into her own person - someone I have never met before. Sure, certain of her experiences VERY loosely mirror some of mine, but as a whole, she's a complete fabrication.

It's been a new experience for me and very interesting.

[scarletpeaches]

What I write is inspired by events that mutate so much in the drafting that eventually they bear no resemblance to the original event. Characters are often the same. But I don't write immediately after an event which inspires a piece of writing. I work on something else, get some objectivity on this event/person/happening then come back to it when it's mutated into something worth writing. Poetry is different. I write about things that happened yesterday, if I so choose. Lends it more immediacy. But with prose, as it's longer, it seems to want to sit in the back of my mind for a longer period of time. Probably because a book is about a character, whereas a poem is about an event. At least that's the case with me.

[SusanR]

There are also times when some interesting character will occur to me and she will grow completely on her own. For example, the main character of my current WIP is a woman who makes the last meals for death row prisoners. I'm not sure where she came from at all, but through the writing, she has grown into her own person - someone I have never met before. Sure, certain of her experiences VERY loosely mirror some of mine, but as a whole, she's a complete fabrication.

It's been a new experience for me and very interesting.

Wow...little explosions went off in my brain reading that. What fascinating possibilities in a character who cooks the last meals for the condemned. Nice touch! I'd love to get inside THAT character's head while she's in the kitchen.

SusanR

[zeprosnepsid]

I've never based a character on anyone or used anything that's ever actually happened to me in a novel, but my writing is more often than not psychologically autobiographical. I also have a hang up. More than 50% of my protagonists are 16 year old girls. It's like Spielberg and children of divorce.

[KelseyF]

One of my current projects is about a summer I spent working out at a barn. Some of it is fictionalized, but a lot of it is about the people and memories that I hold very close to me.

[Mistook]

The story I'm writing is more or less the autobiography of my daydreams through a certain year of my life. In other words, it's my life, thinly veiled, but presented as though all the daydreams and paranoid fantasies of that period were actually happening in reality.

Originally I was going to write an actual biography, but then it struck me that it would be a lot more engaging if it were presented as fiction. This is also why it's ended up being more or less Urban Fantasy.

Many of the characters are based on my actual friends and family, but the main character is purely fictional. I decided to use her as the focal point of the story to take the heat of myself. My own character is always in the background, has very few lines, and isn't given any POV scenes.

If I ever finish this thing, I can think of a prequel and a sequel that could be written, but I doubt I'll ever be a "career" novelist, writing purely fictional stories for their own sake. The only reason I'm writing now is because I think I have this one bizarre story in me that could be riotously entertaining if it were told right.

[blisswriter]

Everything I write is tinged with my life. But I've lived many lives so I think it's okay.

[Jamesaritchie]

No, I don't piece them together. That sounds as if I consciously think of characteristics and "make up" a new character, which I don't do. Instead, they seem to grow from inside me; I "feel" them. In the case of lead characters, I become them. It's hard to describe, but it's definitely not a piecing together of people I've known. Same with events; many, if not most, of these have no connection with my own life. Events I've lived thoruh, or read about, spark many of the fictional events; and many of my own experiences do feed into such fictional events. Many; but certainly not all.

Let me put this another way. If, consciously or subconsciously, your charcters aren't created from yourself, or from parts of other people, then how can they be characters who react as real people react?

Either we base the way our characters think and react on the way we think react, or we base the way our characters think and react based on how people we've known think and react.

[Kiva Wolfe]

Admittedly, every character I write into my story is an aspect of me. I'm bad, I'm good, I'm whatever. My readers tell me I am especially good at writing villains. Huh.

[Mistook]

One of my current projects is about a summer I spent working out at a barn. Some of it is fictionalized, but a lot of it is about the people and memories that I hold very close to me.


When I first read your post, I thought you had spent this summer working-out (lifting weights and exercising) at a barn. I thought, "Wow! What a strange concept for a story."

[aruna]

Let me put this another way. If, consciously or subconsciously, your charcters aren't created from yourself, or from parts of other people, then how can they be characters who react as real people react?

Either we base the way our characters think and react on the way we think react, or we base the way our characters think and react based on how people we've known think and react.

I never denied that everything I write is created out of my own substance, and is thus a part of myself:

Obviously, my own mind is the quarry out of which I reap my stories. What other substance should I use? But that's just the raw material.
(from my first post here)

That much is obvious; so we agree. Just that the terminology "pieced together", or "parts of other people" and so on doesn't ring true for me; not even from the subconscious level. That sounds too much like a puzzle where the parts have to be fitted together. I don't feel it's like that at all.

When I create a character, I close my eyes anbd stop thinking. I let that character come to me, afeel into him or her, and let their being fill me. That's how I get to "know" them. And yet still, they can be real people because when tey come to me I fill them with my own consciousness. I've always felt, from my very first book, that every character, every story, I create already exists; that it;s all there, deep inside, fully formed, and I have to only let them out.

I know that it's my own substance, my own consciousness, that forms them, and that that subconscuious knowledge is derived out of the sum total of my own experiences in this world. But the words "piecing together" is something that occurs ona conscious level; I don't believe the subconscious pieces together. It's like water; the substance of the water is flow, and everything else, the characteristics, are gathered from hundreds and thousands of embedded impressions, all picked up by that water, and carried along in the flow.

They can react as real people do because, even if I haven't created them consciously, somewhere deep inside me my subconscious is working and knows how people react, and what "they" (my characters) would say and do in a given situation. My job is to trust that process, and interfere as little as possible. The less "I" interfere, the more believable my characters.

This probably doesn't make sense to anyone else.

[SusanR]

This probably doesn't make sense to anyone else.

It makes sense to me. My process feels similar to what you describe. I think the most intuitive, lovely bits of character come in a flash of inspiration, a gift from the subconscious. You don't so much create them as receive them. Those bits eventually take on a life of their own, and your whole, complex, 'living' human being--your character--is born.

At first, you know you need a character of a certain type, an unhappily married woman, say. That's the skeleton. Barely alive, just suggesting a human being. You might even be one of those writers who have a whole biography of the character before you begin writing the story. But the character isn't psychologically alive until you put her in action in the story. Then she starts reacting in her unique and peculiar ways, remembering, thinking, feeling, and ultimately making choices that drive the story. She grows deeper, richer, more real.

Just yesterday, my MC confessed that she and her husband struggled with infertility issues trying to conceive a child. After three in vitro fertilization attempts, she finally had a viable pregnancy: a girl. But the fetus died in utero--strangled in an extra-long umbilical cord. I didn't know that about her, but it accounts for a lot of her motivation in the story.

I often had that kind of "aha!" experience when I did psychotherapy. I remember once "getting" something important about a patient of mine, and saying to him, "You live your whole life as if your only two choices were to be a cop or a crook." And that's when he told me he'd tried to get into the police academy, and that indeed, he had spent more than one night in jail in the year or two after being rejected. Ding! The experience of "receiving" that insight about him was not unlike receiving bits of character.

It's the most fun part of psychotherapy. And writing.

SusanR

[aruna]

It makes sense to me. My process feels similar to what you describe. I think the most intuitive, lovely bits of character come in a flash of inspiration, a gift from the subconscious. You don't so much create them as receive them. Those bits eventually take on a life of their own, and your whole, complex, 'living' human being--your character--is born.

Yes, that's it. It's as if they're born, fully formed, and all I do is "dis-cover" them.

[WriterInChains]

This probably doesn't make sense to anyone else.


It makes perfect sense to me -- the way you describe your characters & how you tell their stories is the same as my own experience. Sometimes I question my grip on reality, but most of the time I just enjoy the whole process. I don't have a novel published (yet?), but it's nice to know at least I'm doing something right.

Have a wonderful weekend!
Caren