As a Writer, Be Yourself
Writing is personal. Even if we write the most commercial of commercial fiction, we pour our heart and soul into our work. We bleed onto the page. Writing isn’t for the faint of heart.
But is writing autobiographical? Even if you’re writing a memoir, how much of yourself do you actually put on the page? How much of the people in your life end up as a characters? And is that fair to them? To yourself?
We often hear “write what you know” (which, in concept is great, but much too limited in its advice, in my opinion). We know ourselves, our experiences, our friends, our family. We know their experiences, and maybe that’s why we write, to share their stories and ours with the world.
But remember we want stories, not anecdotes. Not lists of ancestors or sequences of epic events. It’s not the what happens that matters to readers; it’s the why those events matter to the protagonist.
And we can’t know the why until we dive deep into our characters. Since we often learn how to dive deep by learning about ourselves, I believe the most real, most relatable characters come from within.
It can be scary to open a vein, to graft parts of ourselves onto our characters, into our stories—especially memoirs. But every book reflects its author, and that is exactly what we want. So be brave on the page. Be yourself.