Writing Blog Number 2

20240213 Autobiography In Fiction

Autobiography In Fiction

Reader request again!
"How much of yourself is in your fiction?"

Nowadays, it's hard to say, because I have over half a century of experience and also of listening to other people.

However, when I started writing, a lot of the incidents I included in my work were autobiographical, especially the day-to-day, run of the mill stuff (the stuff about travelling to alternate worlds, fighting demons and that... not so much... honestly). But it was the characters who were really drawn from reality. In fact, my first few long works, written when I was in high school, my friends had great fun trying to work out who was who. (In primary school, in the long work I wrote, my friends knew who was who because I didn't change the names!)

As I've got older, I will still use little incidents that happened to me or around me or viewed by me because it just adds a touch of realism to my own mind, And, considering I write predominantly horror, it helps to make the horror (again, to me) more visceral, especially when focused against the real and mundane.

If I look at the story Lines Of Communication in my port ("Lines Of Communication" ), the first three chapters happened almost exactly as I wrote them to the coupling pair. (He was one of my good mates, while she was a girl I came to know as a good friend over the years.) The stuff around them in those chapters was an amalgamation of various incidents from other parties, but they all happened as well. While they were both my friends, after that third year, we'd left school and the whole party scene just stopped. However, for the story, I just took it and ran with it. The later chapters were based on other things I saw with other couples. Only a few of the incidents actually came wholecloth from my imagination; I just made unconnected vignettes into a hopefully coherent story. Autobiographical? Maybe.

But, to be honest, it did make it harder to write, because I really wanted to hide who was who...

However, if I look at Invasive Species, not a single thing in that is based on reality. The story started when I found some snakes living in my shed, and a friend from the gym had her long hair cut very short and all her friends gave her grief about it. The teacher was based at the start on someone I worked with, then i added so much extra that it wasn't him; the snake-catcher was from my imagination. So, no autobiography there, and yet it is probably one of the best things I have written.

I guess I haven't answered the question, so:

Reader request again!
"How much of yourself is in your fiction?"

*It depends on the story and how much of my life I need to put into it to make it work realistically.