Basing fiction on personal life
I had in mind to use threads from my own life as a foundation for work, keeping much of the incidents, traits and all, but building upon them in a potentially different direction. What are the pitfalls?
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Most writers utilize elements of their own experience when they create their fiction. Some of the best fiction depends heavily on the writer's own life. John Irving is an excellent example of a highly successful and respected writer who creates much of his fiction out of modifications of his own life. John Grisham, a lawyer, writes about lawyers. Dashiell Hammett, a detective, wrote about detectives. Robin Cook, a doctor, writes about doctors. Examples abound.
Even when creating stories that seem to have little to do with one's own life, or even one's own world, most writers almost inevitably incorporate something of their own experience. At a minimum, what we have learned as human beings informs our writing even when we're writing about robots battling dinosaurs in another galaxy.
For me, it goes back to the basic dictum: *Write what you know." Truer words were never spoken. So don't hesitate to use as much of your own life as you want. Just remember to make good choices about which "real" elements advance the story, and be creative about modifying the reality to make the story work.
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Considering that many of those threads from your life probably also involved other people, another pitfall is that someone else might recognize himself in your book and not like what you write about "him". If he's too recognizable, it might even get you in legal trouble.
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When writers base fiction too closely on their own experiences, they can sometimes lose the ability to truly play with the story. I think this is because they are not consciously making as many decisions as a writer of "pure" fiction. They can be tempted to simply record what happened in real life (and to skip inventing material to fill in the gaps of their own knowledge about other people's motivations or bits of the experience that they didn't notice), instead of pondering how to best tell a good story. I've known writers whose story details should have been changed or expanded to better support their theme or create atmosphere, but who resisted the suggestion that they do so because "this is how it really happened."
Writing from life CAN limit your mental ability or willingness to be flexible with your story, and to shape the details in order to support your overall theme.
However, nothing is so convincing in fiction as material that the author truly knows. The ring of authenticity is valuable and definitely worth the pitfalls of writing from life.
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