7 Tips on How Fiction Writers and Use Personal Experiences To Write Realistic Novels
What I’ve been blogging about the last few days is about writing personal stories, but what I really was hoping to emphasize is that personal stories make our writing come alive. One of the reasons I love reading memoirs is that the writing is always so vivid and passionate. I believe a big reason for this is that the author is so invested in the story. They’ve lived through the experiences in the book, and they care about getting the story just right.
Today, I want to focus on fiction and creating the same effect in our fictional scenes whether we’re pulling from our personal experience or not.
If I went through each of my books and told you exactly which scenes were inspired by real events, you’d probably agree that those were the most realistic scenes and probably the ones you could picture the best. I won’t bore you with too many examples. But I want to share just one.
I’ve been a teacher all my life and back before I started my teaching career and was still a student, I worked as a tutor at an elementary school. One morning as teachers were arriving to work and setting up their classrooms for the day, a man came into the school which was designed in an open format, meaning that it was one large building with only dividers separating one classroom…