. . . I hope you forgive me. It was either this or pictures of Grandboy, which I find endlessly fascinating, but have nothing to do with writing. This one is from last April, so it's not too dusty. Enjoy.
I’ve often heard it said that you should “write what you
know,” and I’ve been thinking about how much we use what we know in our
writing. So often, when I go back and reread what I’ve written, little things
pop in my manuscripts that I recognize are a part of my own life.
Sometimes it’s people I know—there’s a good chance Aunt
Bette in my newest WIP is a lot like a certain sassy member of my extended
family. There’s a lot of my friend
Connie in Julie Miles’s irreverent comments, but also in Carrie Reilly’s
orderly life, and if you knew my kid, you’d definitely hear him in Jack—the
brilliant musical prodigy in Once More
From the Top. So yeah, my characters get some of their traits from people
in my real life and even some from me. A friend once told me that she had a
hard time with the first fifty pages or so of my first novel, Rule Number One, because the heroine
talked like me and she couldn’t separate Katy Ruth Gilligan and Nan Reinhardt.
Well, the heroine is figment of my imagination, so that she would sometimes
talk like me shouldn’t be a surprise. It didn’t stop my friend from finishing
and enjoying that book and all my others, and if she saw a little of me in any
others, she never mentioned it.
Sometimes, my characters seem to do things that I do or that
people in my life do. Sophie Russo in The
Summer of Second Chances is a freelance editor—career that I know quite a
bit about because . . . well, I’m a freelance editor. It made research really
easy! And frankly, because I edit a lot of computer books and know a lot of
folks in publishing, it wasn’t hard to invent Henry Dugan’s career as a
publisher and writer. I got the idea for the women’s shelter in Sex and the Widow Miles from my sisters
volunteering for an agency that helps homeless families. In the in-progress
fourth book of the Women of Willow Bay series, Julie's dear friend, Sarah, is escaping an abusive ex-husband, something a friend of mine went through--her advice was invaluable as I created Sarah.
I love Michigan—if I wasn’t so firmly entrenched in Indiana,
I’d live in Michigan in a heartbeat. One of those little towns along the shore
of Lake Michigan would be just about perfect. My mom loved Michigan, too, and
we spent nearly every weekend camping up there when I was growing up, so I come
by my love of the Great Lakes State quite naturally. Mostly, I love lakes, so
my books all take place around fresh water, pretty much around Lake Michigan, I
just realized, because my other WIP happens in northern Indiana—just a block or two from
Lake Michigan, which means there will be long beach walks and characters
dipping their toes in the icy water on warm summer days.
Dialogue often comes from pieces of conversations I’ve had
with friends or family or even strangers. I collect words and phrases and ideas
from every situation I’m in, even every film or TV show I watch, every book or
magazine I read. Don’t we all do that? My family has dozens of movie lines and
book quotes that mean something to only us. “Weird, Margaret,” is a phrase my
sister and I say when something seems odd to either of us. It’s from our
childhood—a line from the Dennis the Menace comic strip. After forty-some years
of living with me, Husband says it now, too. Lines from old movies are an
everyday part of life in our family. Heck, we’ve been known to have entire
conversations made up of nothing but movie lines.
All of it—conversations, situations, places, what we read,
what we watch, people we spend time with, people we know well, and people we’ve
just met—if you’re a storyteller, a piece of every experience in your life will
eventually find its way into a story. It might be so subtle, you aren’t even
aware of it creeping into your writing, or it might be something so significant
that the only way you can process it is to write about it. . .
I've had people ask me if I make people I know my characters. I try not to, but the voices in my head gotta come from somewhere don't they?
ReplyDeleteYup, Ava, they do. I don't see how we can help but find our characters in the people around us to some degree. Thanks for stopping by!
DeleteWorth a re-read! Hope you're feeling better.
ReplyDeleteHey, Liz! Working on feeling better--my mom always said a cold lasts 7 days or a week, whichever comes first. This one gets 10 days because of the slight hitch with the hives so I'm thinking I'm about halfway through and that's about how I feel--halfway. Better is just around the corner. ;-)
DeleteI absolutely agree with you, Nan! Thanks for sharing this one again...and I hope you feel better soon.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Kristi--I'm working on better. ;-)
ReplyDeleteI'm glad you are on the mend. Your posts always help me see that much of what I am writing is normal. As I write more, many of my friends and family will probably find themselves, or at least some of their characteristics, in my books. We do write what we know. (Just so you know I always check my responses to you to make sure they are written correctly)
ReplyDeleteThanks for stopping by, Carolyn. We all find our inspiration in the world around us, I think. And for what it's worth, you don't need to check your comments...comments and texts are no-edit zones, baby!
ReplyDeleteI hope you're feeling better, Nan. I know little bits of me and my philosophy of life get into my books, and I guess it's inevitable. I suppose that makes my stories unique, just as yours are unique, and so are everyone else's books!
ReplyDeleteExactly, Jana! And thanks, I am feeling a little better today. ;-)
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