Drawing from Your Life to Create Fiction

Join me this Friday, March 25th at 11am when I discuss drawing from your life to create fiction with the National Association of Memoir Writers.

Fiction or Memoir

My experience writing fiction and helping writers with plot taught me that memoir writers aren’t the only ones who draw from life to create their stories. All writers do. Write what you know to capture the exact right details, riveting drama, and insightful emotion. At first anyway. Overtime, the more stories we write the less the need to explore and rely on what we know. At some point, imaginations and innate wisdom take over.

Not all of us are as brave as memoir writers. Rather than proclaim our truth and reveal our backstory wound, we bury it in fiction.

Buried Secrets

Parallel Lives A 60’s Love Story illuminates the ways against all odds two people are destined for each other. I wanted to explore the idea that we encounter the person we love years before actually being introduced, and not just once, but several times. The challenge of plotting two main characters crossing paths during major political events in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1960s fit me as the Plot Whisperer. Little did I know when I started how personal the novel would become and how much trepidation I felt sharing the novel even with my truth buried in fiction.

Weaving Real Life into Fiction

Join us as I discuss about what happens when you choose to write fiction drawing from your life – both the impact to you emotionally and to the story structurally.