Recently, I was thinking back to my English classes at high school. For one particular assignment, my English teacher instructed us to write about some event in our past. We were only 13 years old at the time; not a lot of years lived to have acquired too many interesting events in our life, but all of us were able to find something to write about without much trouble.
I chose to write about some of my experiences from when I was six years old and living on an island in the West Indies. As I wrote, everything was vivid in my memory: the sights, the sounds, the smells, the tastes and the people. And for once in my school days, the words just flowed effortlessly from my pen. I wrote about the games that I played and that other older children played; the different activities at a school fair that my sister and I attended one afternoon; some of the culture and habits of the local people and so forth.
One reason why I remember that assignment so well is that even though I thought that other assignments I had done in my English class had been better than that one, my English teacher did not. He gave me the highest mark I ever received in his class.
This reminds me of the advice given to writers to “write what is in you!” To take some events that have happened to you, or friends and family, and turn it into a fiction novel. To develop a character in your fiction writing and endow him or her with habits and personality traits of people you know or have met.
But isn’t that cheating you may ask? Not at all! Many writers do it! Just think of the James Bond fiction series. Its author Ian Fleming is said to have given several of his own personal traits to the main character James Bond and to have based him on one or more persons that he knew!
The crime fiction novelist, the late Dick Francis was a former steeplechase jockey so it is no surprise that when he became a writer, his novels centered on horse racing.
One of my favorite authors, John Grisham, was a practicing lawyer, so it is no surprise that he wrote many legal thrillers. The list could go on, but whether you read romantic fiction, suspense fiction, horror fiction, crime fiction or mystery fiction, there is a very good chance that the author is basing some of his characters or some of the events on people or events he or she knows or has experienced personally. And there is no harm in that! Just like when I wrote my school assignment, I could write far more vividly because I was writing about something I knew, not that I had to devise or imagine. The lesson I learned at that time: when you write about what you know, it can add life to your writing!
Sometimes, though, life can be stranger than fiction. A friend of mine knew one man who had a particularly horrible experience in one country in Africa, which ended up with him fleeing for his life. He later wrote a fiction novel based on his experiences, sent it to a publisher and received back a message saying that they could not publish his novel as, though the plot was excellent, it was too incredible for people to believe! If he had the Internet when he wrote it, at least he could have written his book as an
online novel!
So there is no need to reinvent the wheel. As a saying goes, “there is nothing new under the sun!” Keep drawing on your personal experiences and knowledge as a source for your own fiction writing and see how this brings your writing to life!
