Some things write themselves

This may be my last post for a few weeks. I'm having spine surgery on Wednesday and will be highly medicated while lying down, sitting, or standing as the case may be as I recover. However, as I'm pretty much homebound for at least a month (I can't even get in a car for that long), I may be craving non-spouse human interaction and may also encounter some glorious moments of lucidity and will brave the pain to share them. Here's hoping.

Alright, back to the writing craft.

When I took a creative writing class in college, my instructor encouraged us to "write what we know." Every aspiring author has heard these words and has either taken them to heart or cast them whirling into the winds as they desire. I took them very seriously because I've found that life + poetic license = pretty good fiction. So far all of my stories have drawn deeply on actual events reinterpreted or bent to my will. For instance, I fixed my romantic naivete and ultimate dumb mistake in one story. But the events up to the end were almost entirely exact to what happened in real life, all the way down to the songs that played at the club. That story wrote itself. All I did was tweek it a little to salve my bruised ego.

Since then, I've continued to draw heavily from my life, even if it's just details and locations. The home in my YA novel is a variant of a house I lived in as a teenager, and the location itself is my childhood home. Some of the events are true as well. I'm even going to keep the name of the road. It's simply too appropriate.

Real personal events and details are like an umbilical cord. While the story develops, you feed it with emotions and rich details that sustain it even as you're creating something entirely unique and ultimately independent. It's also like letting a child run wild in home territory, exploring all the hidey-holes you'd forgotten. New eyes, new adventures, new revelations.

It can also be therapeutic. I've rewritten and explored some painful events in my life, and just the act of remolding them or imbuing some unifying perspective makes them easier to handle. Not to mention that you get to right some wrongs or recast yourself as the hero instead of the fool. Or vice-versa. Sometimes it's fun be wild in print. To explore the not-so-logical options, to slip the bonds of morality for a while. It keeps you from going insane.

So why is this important? To me at least? Think about that child running wild in a familiar place. You know all the details, all the potential hiding places, all the creaky boards and groaning hinges. You know the smell, the quality of light, the way the dust swirls in the slanting sun-beams. You know the place. The action might be new and hard to describe, but the locale is familiar and perhaps beloved. You can imagine it without effort and that can make writing about it almost automatic. And again, you can imbue the place and your writing with all those interlacing connotations swelling inside you. It can mean a scene or story that writes itself.

That can't be bad.