People discover I write, and that I do it full time. Instantly, they start dragging out their personal histories, hoping, even begging me to write it as a family saga or “the life and times of….”
“Ah, I write fiction, not memoirs or biographies,” I tell them.
They nod their heads, eager for me to snap up their dangling dirty underwear, untidy remnants still visible.
…And I do snag up these offered tidbits, but not the way they want or expect.
What they expect is for me to write their family saga or life experience into a novel they can recognize as “their story.” Instead, I just tuck these sundry articles away for future use…as bits and pieces — the worlds, the dialogue, the lives, the people, and the interesting experiences.
Some of these tidbits are gruesome — truth ever worse than fiction; some of them are startling. My favorites are the humorous “in situ.”
When and if the source ever sees something based upon that tidbit, though, they might recognize the parallel, but they never can quite put their finger on whether or not that might be “them” or “from their lives.”
And when they ask me?
I smile and tell them that the idea came from my own life experiences…which it did. I heard or saw something, maybe from them or someone else, maybe from my own life, or maybe from a combination of several, which came to the forefront during the creative process, already pre-adjusted to the novel’s needs, completely altered from its original sources.
For me, that’s part of the fun of writing fiction — to watch how what I know comes out, warped by plot, story, and my admittedly wicked imagination!
Recently:
- Moving is Tough on Writing Novels
- Move complete & back online…when the DSL doesn’t falter
- Offline for a week.
- The ‘I’ Proposition
- No, I didn’t get eaten by my novel.
- Scott Heim reads We Disappear at last reading at Chelsea
- Hunger in the World
- What a Beta Reader Can & Cannot Do
- A Gift for Eternity Finds a Home
- Today’s Giggle: SE vs Employee, the Benefits — Not.
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