How to Use Life Experiences in Fiction Writing by guest blogger Michael Potts

How to Use Life Experiences in Fiction Writing

Michael Potts

Great Uncle Bill and Daddy stand over the white, hairy shape on the side of the road. Daddy says, “That’s Fuzzy,” and he shoes me away. I am six-years-old and do not believe that my dog is dead. I hide in a small clearing in the bushes by our house and pretend Fuzzy is still alive. Before long my pretending turns to belief.

            I use that experience in a scene in my novel, End of Summer. This raises the question of

how a writer can use life experiences in writing fiction—and where does creative nonfiction end and fiction begin? All writers make use of their life experiences, of people they have known over the years, of good and bad deeds by relatives and friends. That is risky, as Thomas Wolfe discovered after the success of his novel, Look Homeward, Angel. Locals saw themselves in his fiction (perhaps they did!), and many were not pleased.

            Different authors use different techniques to fictionalize fact. In my novel, the main character, Jeffrey (named for my fraternal twin brother who died two hours after birth) is nine, not six. It is Jeffrey’s granddaddy, not his daddy, who is with Great Uncle Rick (the name is changed), and instead of leaving the dog in the ditch, Uncle Rick lifts his body over the fence, gives it to Jeffrey’s granddaddy. The rest of that vignette follows my memory of the actual events.

            I had Jeffrey’s parents die in a car accident when he was two (my actual parents do not appreciate that, but they understand I wanted to focus on Jeffrey’s relationship with his granddaddy). Granddaddy is mainly based on my own granddaddy, but with some of my daddy’s traits. Daddy hunted; Granddaddy did not. In the book, Granddaddy goes rabbit hunting with Jeffrey, and what happens during that hunt is the inciting incident. My own granddaddy died less than a month before my twenty-first birthday; in the book, Jeffrey’s granddaddy dies when he is nine (and Jeffrey’s reaction to that death is the focus of the plot). Granny is based closely on my granny and behaves consistently according to my memories of her.

            Granddaddy took me, a neighbor, and another friend on a twenty plus mile bike ride when

I was thirteen-years-old. In the book, I omitted the other friend and used some of the actual dialogue, but most was made up. This is different from creative nonfiction in which the author can make minor changes to allow a story to flow better, but still presents events as they happened. In fiction, characters based on real life characters are “fictionalized,” and while dialogue may be taken from memory, most if it is invented by the author.

            I focus on Jeffrey’s struggles after his granddaddy got sick and later died. He struggles with his faith (I struggled later in life), and I invent a fictional conversation between an atheist great-uncle (who is based on my own agnostic great-uncle) in which the great-uncle tries to convince Jeffrey to “grow up” and embrace atheism.  I keep other details of my actual great-uncle’s life—that he was born in Toronto and lived for many years in Detroit before moving to Tennessee, that he owned beagles, loved rabbit hunting, kept chickens, and had a basketball goal in his front yard. I accurately tell a story of when a neighbor of his and I discover Playboy magazines on my great-uncle’s porch.

            The entire book is framed by a fictional story in which the adult Jeffrey returns to his granddaddy’s field to walk to a thicket—a “sacred space” where Jeffrey played with Granddaddy when Jeffrey was a child. During the walk Jeffrey struggles with some of his own quirks of character and tries to deal with his doubt regarding God that dates back to his granddaddy’s death. Will he be able to find some resolution when he enters “The Thicket,” a symbol of an idyllic childhood with his granddaddy?

            These are some ways you can turn fact into fiction instead of creative nonfiction. Hopefully other authors will comment on these and make their own suggestions on how to write fiction based on one’s own life story.

For more on Michael and his writing, 

visit his website CLICK HERE

Check out his books and bio on AMAZON or Barnes & Noble
Follow him on Twitter @Cthulhu77

The Three A's of Setting by guest blogger Charles R. Stubbs

The Three ‘A’s of Choosing the Right Setting

by Charles R. Stubbs

There is a well-known adage that you should ‘write about what you know about.’ But just as importantly, you should write about where you know about. Furthermore, you should carefully choose locations for your stories that add value to and support the plot.

Accuracy

It can be very annoying for a reader who is well-immersed in your story to discover a glaring error in the text which relates to the setting of the plot. Even though you may well have invited your readership to suspend belief (for example, by writing about zombies, or space travel, or fantasy adventures), if you get something wrong about the location where the events are supposed to take place, and the reader spots this, it can undermine the whole reader experience. Most dangerous is writing about countries you have never visited. I once reviewed a text that was set in the UK. Not only were crickets chirping at night in the mountains (in fact, it is eerily quiet) and wolves prowling (we have none in the UK), but the language used by the inhabitants was wrong, along with other details such as what the characters ate (beef jerky; hash browns for breakfast).

Atmosphere

Unless you have visited a place and (preferably) know it well, you can have at best only a partial

appreciation of what it’s really like to be there. No matter how many films I’ve seen set in American cities like Los Angeles and Chicago, I know that any attempt I might make to describe a plot developing in one of those cities would be without depth. By contrast, in my mystery thriller novels, the Travis #WebOfDeceit series, all the action takes place in North Wales, an area of the UK that I know well and truly love. In the first novel of the series I have been able to tell the reader what it is like to climb a mountain, smell the freshness of the air, wander through cloud; and more mundane things, like eating in a small café in Wales. The locations add value to the plot by helping the reader to visualize and appreciate what the characters are seeing and experiencing as the story develops.

Appropriateness

It is important that the location you choose helps the plot along, rather than hinders it. Trying to ‘shoehorn’ the action of a story into an inappropriate setting is another source of distraction for the reader. For example, a plot device I use in ‘Web of Deceit’ is the non-reliability of mobile phone signals. In the Welsh mountains in 1999 this was an annoying and well-known phenomenon. Readers would not be convinced that characters were having trouble with their mobile phone connections in the middle of a city like London in 2013.

Conclusion

Pay attention to the three ‘A’s—Accuracy, Atmosphere and Appropriateness—when setting your novel, and your readers will be able to concentrate on your story and enjoy it all the more.

Charles R. Stubbs is a writer of mystery thriller novels. His next novel ‘Retribution,’ which involves the same set of characters as in ‘Web of Deceit,’ is due out in August 2013.

Follow him on Twitter @CharlesRStubbs

What Makes an Author by guest blogger Michael Parker

What makes an author? And why so many? 

By Guest Blogger Michael Parker

When I look at other writers, they always seem to be successful, cool, best-sellers, prolific. They have

that confidence about them that says how easy it is for them to turn out novel after novel, no sweat. But the reality is so different, and you can only get to understand this by experience, by sitting down and suffering writer’s block, knowing that you need another three or four thousand words for that day, and then just another seventy or eighty thousand to finish the book. How many times have I heard someone say they are writing a book and have written about ten thousand words? And you know that they are never going to finish it because of the hard work involved.

All writers suffer this problem to some degree, although there are others who manage to find a way around it. Ian Fleming once said that it takes about six weeks to write a thriller; the editing and grammar corrections can be left to the professionals. Jack Higgins admitted that he wrote a thriller in the space of one weekend. He went into his room on the Friday and came out on the Monday with a best seller. Hard work though. 

Rejections are as familiar to most writers as sunrise and sunset, and I suspect that almost all writers have

suffered this to some degree. I used to find my cynicism creeping in when I read of an author who was surprised that his/her first novel had been accepted with no problem at all, and then you learn that he/she was already connected in some way to the publishing world. It’s all about the market and what sells.

Some of the most prolific best sellers over the years have been pure dross, but they served the market’s hunger for depravity, celebrity or whatever else had nothing to do with talent. 

I asked the question: What makes an author? I believe they are born with the talent. They are like musicians, artists, surgeons, scientists etc. They have something that cannot be manufactured: the ability

to do something that comes almost naturally. I was described as a “gifted narrator” in the Financial Times (London, 1980). What happened to my gift? What happened with my talent? It didn’t go away; it’s still there, but probably too late now for me to become that runaway, best-selling, globe-trotting writer of blockbuster novels. Now I’m getting carried away (but it’s good to dream).

I know how to write, but I probably have no idea how to market myself. And that’s the rub: not knowing how to market your work, or not being able to afford the services of a professional publicist. So now I can say thank goodness for Amazon and Kindle.

I launched myself on the Kindle Select programme when the feeding frenzy happened earlier last year

(2012) and managed to sell over 6000 eBooks. 40,000 of my books were downloaded during the ‘free’ promotion and I went right to the top in the free category for my genre. I was up there with the best-selling talent and I enjoyed every minute of it. Now the dust has settled and the frenzy is over: the KDP Select programme is running out of steam. My book sales have slowed to a low level, but I am at least selling more now than I was before KDP came along.

But let me give you a kind of snapshot of my writing career, which is a hobby by the way. I had my first book (NORTH SLOPE) published by Macmillan of London in 1980. I thought that was it: I’d made it with a top publishing house. They rejected my next book (HELL’S GATE) and it was four years before SHADOW OF THE WOLF was published by Robert Hale of London. 

From that moment I was floundering, trying to get my work published but no-one was interested. I gave up, left manuscripts gathering dust on the shelf, became inspired (my wife claims the credit for that) and continued to write. But I got fed up again and let it all drift. 

Then in 2006, Robert Hale, with whom I had had no contact for years, agreed to publish HELL’S GATE.

This was 23 years after it had been rejected by Macmillan. Hale then published four more of my novels. Suddenly I was on a roll and now I have eight novels to my credit, the latest of which, THE BOY FROM BERLIN (December 2011) has been taken up by Harlequin Books and is available in paperback in North America and Canada. They have also agreed to publish another of my Hale books, THE EAGLE’S COVENANT, which is due for release in November this year (2013).

So finally things are looking up. But getting back to the subject of marketing; what is it I’m doing wrong,

or not doing? I was advised to use Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google, Stumble, Goodreads and all those web sites that are supposed to be a gift for writers to get advancement. Oh yes, and I needed a blog. So I blog on my website and copy it to all those places. In two years of blogging I have had no more than about four contacts. My statistics are pretty sad. I know people are looking in at my blog, but I don’t know how many actually read it. I never get the kind of reaction I see when looking in on other writers’ sites. I suspect that it is probably the same for most of us.

Having been down the traditional route of publishing, I find the Amazon deal quite exciting because of the potential to climb up the ladder. For those of you who have not experienced the traditional way believe me it’s no fun. Finding an agent or a publisher was like looking for hen’s teeth in a chicken run. 

And if you were lucky enough to get published, the hardback book was set at a fixed price with no

paperback allowed for at least a year (if you were lucky). The collapse of the Net Book Agreement in 1997 put a stop to price fixing, but it didn’t help wannabe writers like me: The top guns still held sway over publishers.

But now most of that is being swept aside by the Amazon and eBook revolution. The only problem with

that now is that it kind of takes away the kudos of being able to say you are a published author. We are all writers now: anyone can get published. For an old fashioned traditionalist who has been through the school of hard knocks in the literary world, it’s a shame that I now find myself among the bottom feeders of the so-called electronic slush pile. But I’ve been among the bottom feeders all the time really; the difference now is that I can literally control my own writing destiny. I’ve just got to get to grips with the promotion and marketing.

But for those of you out there who are trying, I wish you luck. I will always have faith in my own ability, but one thing writers should understand is that you need a readership to be successful. In the old, hardback days that meant having at least five published novels to your credit, and that was no mean feat. Today you need a lot of luck, and not just be a decent writer. 

For more on Michael Parker  and his writing, check out his website http://www.michaeljparker.com 

Follow him on Twitter @Michael_Parker

Guest Blogger Ethan Jones on Plot, Structure and Character Development

Plot, structure, and character development

by Ethan Jones

The plot plays a major role in most thrillers and suspense novels. The structure generally needs to follow traditional conventions of the genre. The character development takes a back seat, but it is still important as an effective tool in most novels.

When it comes to plot, spy thrillers offer an almost endless supply of scenarios. The writer can focus on traitors, coup d’états, assassinations, terrorist attacks, intelligence leaks and much more. The main plot needs to be an important event or idea that is substantial and worthy of the reader’s attention for the average of three hundred pages of a novel in this genre. The main plot and the sub-plot threads should flow naturally, intertwining smoothly with the progression of the story.

In my novels, I focus on a single major plot—for example, finding the mole within the Canadian Intelligence Service in FOG OF WAR, the latest spy thriller in the Justin Hall series—that interconnects with a host of minor sub-plots. They give a layered and richer effect to the storyline for the purpose of entertaining and satisfying readers. While there is nothing wrong with just having one plot, most stories do not take place in a vacuum and readers like to learn at least something about other events that take place simultaneously with the main plot. At the same time, minor plots serve well to fill in those places when characters need to take a break from the main storyline. In FOG OF WAR, two minor sub-plots include a theft of weapons from a powerful Russian oil baron and the main character’s relationship with his fiancée.

The structure of spy thrillers is usually more rigid because of readers’ expectation from the genre, but still it provides writers enough space and flexibility. Conflict must escalate and the main character’s situation must get from bad to worse before the climax and the final clash between good and evil, where good, of course, triumphs. Numerous variations of this scheme allow for a faster pace during action scenes—car chases, gun fights, reconnaissance missions—and for breathing room and introspection during analysis of the intelligence collected, deductions, and perhaps a bit of romance.

The majority of best-selling spy authors craft their story in such a way that the structure resembles a rollercoaster of action-filled scenes, followed by a few slower pages for the character and the reader to catch their breath. The major climax is usually placed closer to the end of the book, with a few loose ends tied up neatly in the last chapters or the epilogue. This is my preferred method, but other authors may go for a slower start, the climax somewhere in the middle, and then a slower end.

The character development allows spy thrillers to give the reader a look inside the mind and the heart of their heroes and villains, which may be difficult to achieve through plot devices. While sometimes the background story or flashbacks into the history of the characters may slow down the pace, they allow the reader to see a fuller picture of the heroes and the villains and perhaps another side of them. I try to make my heroes as human as possible, with faults, worries, and fears. My villains also are able to have sympathy, to feel love and joy, albeit for the wrong reasons. As long as there is a logical motivation for their actions, the character development of heroes and villains can only enrich the novel and deepen the readers’ experience.

For more on Ethan and his books, check out his blog HERE

Check out FOG OF WAR or the other Justin Hall novels and more on AMAZON   
Follow him on Twitter @EthanJonesBooks