How Much Is Too Much?

Have you ever read a book or a short story or a blog post or really anything and found yourself drawing conclusions about the writer?

Have you read something particularly meaningful to you and thought that you would certainly like to meet the writer of such a piece, because you’re sure you would be friends? Or have you gone the other route and read something that was so repulsive that you immediately reach the conclusion that the writer is some kind of stupid bridge-dwelling troll that you sincerely hope you never meet?

I picked up a novel called Red Mountain by Boo Walker and found myself drawing conclusions about the author based on the fiction that he wrote. I won’t say what I thought, but I will say read the book, it was quite good. It’s pretty easy to draw conclusions about which character in the novel is the one the author most identifies with once you read the author biography.

That being said…is this true? As an occasional writer of fiction and frequent connoisseur of discussion boards, I came across this question explored from the other side in one of my online writing groups. One of the members asked the million dollar question: When you’re writing, how much of your personal story can you put into the fiction?

There are basically two schools of thought on this. One is that everything that happens to you personally is fair game. It’s all grist for the mill, in other words. If you have at some point told me your story or cut a particularly loud and obnoxious fart in Canadian Tire that I heard (but did not smell, a fact for which I am forever grateful), or you have been one of my weird roommates – at some point, something you did will probably end up in my fiction.

The other thought process is that any part of your personal story is too much because the people around you will try to identify themselves in your characters and you open yourself to libel suits for writing about that guy with the really tiny penis who was arrested for dropping his pants in public and looks suspiciously like your tenth grade math teacher…

I have no definite opinion as to how much of your life belongs in your story. Details are going to creep in, no matter how much you try to avoid it. Maybe your lead character is a dog person and so are you. Maybe you hate pop music and your antagonist plays nothing but. Maybe a quirk your characters have is one that you have, or maybe one you have selectively borrowed from someone you know.

Writers are only working with so many letters that only form so many words and the ideas that are being expressed on the page are most likely incubated from events in the writer’s life. What do I mean by event? Well, there’s all the stuff that happens to each and every one of us personally. Plus there’s all the secondhand stuff that we hear about from other people. And then there is the media that so many of us mindlessly consume all day every day. So, basically anything could be considered an “event” in terms of it generating a creative idea for the right person.

Another book I read recently mentioned something similar in the author’s introduction. The book was (I think) Funerals for Horses by Catherine Ryan Hyde. She was discussing how, after the book was published, people she saw around town would ask her how she was doing, you know, in terms of her mental health. This was because her point of view character had some mental health issues.

What I took away from this was that whether you actually use your story in your fiction or not, people will automatically assume that you have. I don’t know if it’s a matter of our inability to differentiate fact and fiction (which would answer a lot of questions I have about society today), or if it’s just that we want to believe that people only write what they know. Or maybe we really want to believe that the wildest fiction is true, and if it is, sorry, I’m leaving for Hogwarts. Ravenclaw!

When you think about this, it’s enough to make anyone self-conscious. Instead of thinking about the writing and moving forward with it, you get stuck in the idea that if you write about a transgender person, a homophobe, a cooked politician, a Nazi, or a hooker that people will think you are one of those things. Or you’ll think that if you write about something you are not, that people will dismiss your story because you have written about something outside of your experience.

There are good and bad ways to write about things with which you have no personal experience. A bad way would be to resort to racist/sexist/homophobic tropes. A good way would be to do some research and talk to the people who have experience in the areas that you want to write about. Making it up is not a good way to go about it. Presenting something as true when it isn’t is never an acceptable way to go about writing.

Really, there is no way to win in the court of public opinion. My final word on the subject is to write what you want to write and don’t worry as much about what people think about your writing, or about you as the writer.

Everything in a work of fiction is either imaginary or used in a fictitious manner. That’s what we need to remember as readers – no matter what we assume to be true about the writer, it probably isn’t. This is another area where the world would be dramatically improved if we spent less time worrying about what other people said or did or wrote about and more about just getting on with our own creativity.