June 2012
What makes the best stories are ones with elements from your own life. It's much easier to accurately explain something that you have done before, as opposed to something with which you have no experience. To avoid making it autobiographic, I make a list of what I want in each part of the story and I write character sketches. Don't use complete sentences. It's okay to use things from your life, but a list will help you limit similarities. The more you know, the less you will draw from your life.
How do you escape from what always ends up being autobiographical? Do you ever? :p
Everything you write is always going to be somewhat autobiographical because everything you write comes from you, and your brain! One time this pretty famous author, who I won’t name, came and did a talk at UNC and said that he never took anything from his own life and put it into his stories. Afterwards, my whole class agreed that was total bs. Your life will influence your writing in ways that you don’t even realize—and this guy’s stories mostly took place in the neighborhood of the city where he grew up!
Even if you’re writing about an alternate universe a million years in the future, some of your life is going to pervade the characters or the events that take place or which themes you decide to focus on. I’m sure tons of characters in LOTR are similar to people Tolkien knew in real life (actually, does anyone know anything about this, specifically?), and that a lot of the themes in those books are based somewhat on things Tolkien felt passionate about outside of his writing, too.
What I find happens to me is that I take elements from my life and shake them up—so I’ll combine the traits of two or three people I know into one character, or an event that happened to me when I was seven will happen to one of my characters when he’s thirteen. It’s like I take all of my memories and opinions and the people I know and put them in a blender and out comes a story.
Woof I’m having a hard time articulating myself this morning, so does anyone else have any more advice for findingakindoflife on separating your writing from the events of your own life?
Prompt idea by dmosegueda:
Write about having glasses for the first time.
Read followers’ works inspired by this prompt:
- New Glasses by Daniela Osegueda
- Prism by allgonedead
An aside to fake writers/philosophers: improvise. Chances are, the bookcases in a scene will probably serve <1% of your entire novel. Don't get hung up unless the scene is like, absolutely crucial. Think of Harry Potter: there are heaps of books seen in the series; the authors are rarely important, even when referenced in conversation. Rowling chose names that suited her, and moved on. Do the same. As an aside, create names with hidden meaning/references (Socrates = Setar Cos). :)
I think from now on I’m just gonna answer every ask with “Reread Harry Potter and see how JK Rowling did it.”
I mean honestly thats probably way better advice than what I usually say.
So do any other yeah writers watch Girls?
I’m surprised to say I’m actually loving it. And this week’s episode totally had a writer message! If you haven’t watched it yet I guess there are some spoilers sooo read more under the cut.
On that subject, I think it's also important to back it up (as far as making it not seem cheap goes). Have multiple characters reference the same works; don't just make up a name and use it once. If it's supposed to be famous/intellectual, I've always found it to be wise to ingrain it into the culture of your setting. It also makes the over-all setting seem more real, because a majority of cultures have famous works of literature/authors or historical figures/wars.
Oh, also, forgot to reference that we talked about this topic (sort of) before:
yeahwriters.tumblr.com/tagged/futuristic
For iambecauseiwrite: Susanna Clarke made up every single book referenced in Jonathon Strange & Mr. Norrell. Clarke made frequent footnotes regarding these books and made up people from English history. The footnotes become part of the story by adding "historical" citations for references made by Norrell, and help create the appearance of authority on behalf of Norrell. It's a clever device to validate the history and knowledge of the characters.
I thought the Avatar movie--how they have a legend about somebody who rode on a certain type of animal. You can incorporate faux-historical context somehow, so it makes sense and has significance to the reader.
Re: fictional authors/bookshevles. Reference the ideas or ideals you want the books to be about. If you describe the overarching concepts you are looking for, or the author as a legendary/authortative figure in his or her field, you can convey any subject or allude to anyone without actually naming names. Your more savvy readers will get who you are referencing, and the others will at least understand that the fictitous author/book is to be regarded as an authority on the referenced topic.
^This is what I was trying to say haha.
do you ever think about how weird reading is
our eyes are able to scan these different symbols and construct the scenarios and concepts they describe in our mind
and these concepts have the power to twist our emotions and make us cry and laugh and wow reading is weird
I've have a problem with referencing "real things" in my fictional stories. This particular one is scifi/fantasy so it's removed from the "real world". It's not supposed to be Earth in the future. I need my characters to appear knowledgeable without referencing obvious things in existence like ancient Greek philosophers or medieval wars. Ex: What do I put in my characters bookcase? He's the type to read Marx but I can't say Marx. I could make up some names and titles. Is that cheap or detailed?
Is it really important to you that this planet isn’t supposed to be Earth? Because it sounds like it would be more beneficial to you if it was Earth, just way way in the future. Then you could reference real people.
I don’t think it’d be cheap to make up names at all, but they won’t serve any purpose as a reference to how intelligent your characters are if they don’t mean anything to your readers. The only thing you could do is make up different names for Earth historical people and events—like change all the names of the Greek gods and call them the XYZ gods but keep all of their stories the same.
But I would just make in Earth in the future, if it was me.
Anyone have anything to add?
Prompt by kimberleymarie:
Write about a parent/adult who has just shaken a baby out of anger or frustration. What were the circumstances? What is the outcome? Is the child injured? Try to explore the feelings of the shaker - do they feel remorse, anger, fear?
