Do you find the themes you write about come from personal experience?

Lyra Jean · Jul 3, 2006

Most of my themes for my stories, okay I have completed two short stories, deal with children who have absentee parents. The parents are physically there but they don't care about the kids.

Now I'm not saying that my parents don't care about me. They do very much but I'm a child of divorce and I think this where the theme is coming from. I don't write with my theme in mind. It just shows up.

Does anyone else feel like their themes come from personal experience or something you have to deal with everyday?

Writer2011 · Jul 3, 2006

Many of my stories (the one's i've actually finished) don't really come from personal experiences....However I could probably write several stories using things that have happened to me in the past.

maestrowork · Jul 3, 2006

I do tend to let my experience or whatever I am thinking at this stage of my life (marriage, kids, parents, etc.) slip in...

bsolah · Jul 3, 2006

Some of my experiences slip in, my fears etc, but some of my themes are too much to have experienced and then I could write about them. I most likely wouldn't have lasted some of the things my character went through.

Benjamin Solah
Making no sense since, like, forever.

Patricia · Jul 3, 2006

I tend to write more the way I wished my life had been, rather than my real experiences. Weird?

aruna · Jul 4, 2006

I definitely have the same basic theme in all my books, and it does come from my own life. I'd say that the essence of every novel I've written is self-discovery. Someone, usually a woman, is unhappy with who she is and her life and goes on a physical journey of some kind - a different country, playing the violin, infiltrating a sect - only to grow through the experience and come out nearer to who she really is.
This relates entirely to my own life. I left home and country at a very early age, and most of the travelling I've done has been in quest of something illusive which can be neatly described as Self.

In several of my books I started when the MC is a child, and the childhood events that created the internal problem is solved by the action in the MC's adult life. This too reflects my own life, in which I feel everything I deal with now was somehow started when I was a child.

On the surface, tough, my books are fictional - I neither play the violin nor have I tried to save a cult from self-destruction! SO there's an inner and an outer layer to my novels.

Zolah · Jul 4, 2006

rosemerry said:
Does anyone else feel like their themes come from personal experience or something you have to deal with everyday?

Some do. Self-acceptance and letting go of the past are themes which seem to run through everything I write to a greater or lesser extent, and those have been biggies in my life.

On the other hand, I seem to do a lot of writing about grief and losing loved ones, and all my loved ones are still alive apart from my grandparents, whose deaths I don't remember. The only times I've dealt with grief was when adored pets have passed on (which I'm sure would make most people snort) and a couple of years ago when an aunt died, but I wasn't close to her. So why do my characters always get whacked in the head with death?

sunandshadow · Jul 4, 2006

My themes are mostly inspired by what I wish I had in my life - romance, friendship, pregnancy, a new world to explore and adapt to, etc.

PattiTheWicked · Jul 4, 2006

I think my ideas are inspired by things I'd LIKE to see happen, rather than things that specifically HAVE happened. However, I can say I just returned from a three week vacation in Wyoming, and two of the conversations I had with my daughter made it into my WIP.

One includes a reference to dancing the "Poop Scoop Boogie," and I'll let you just wonder about the other.

Jamesaritchie · Jul 4, 2006

theme

In one way or another, loodely or tightly, a great deal of my fiction is based on personal experience. This is what comes out when I sit down to write, and I go with it.

Maryn · Jul 4, 2006

Characters, yes. My fears and self-doubts are often the characters', too. Minor characters are often amalgams of people who've been minor characters in my life, or borrow a trait from someone I know slightly (the bricklayer who took 4 hours to do a chimney estimate because he loved to talk, or the self-righteous parent of a friend of our son's who was sure I'd want a certain book banned from the school library).

Events, no. The plots tend to have no basis in my real life.

Interesting to look at it this way. Am I much stronger at character than plotting because I'm not really doing it?

Maryn, unoriginal

Danger Jane · Jul 4, 2006

Hmm. At first glance, I said no. But when I think about it, the very basic themes do seem to stem from very generalized areas of my life. Themes of mother-daughter, sister-sister...maybe my family has made a bigger impact than I'd have thought. Themes of being forced to accept situations and people probably come from my, ahem, problems in dealing with adverse situations and people who rub me the wrong way. And the theme of falling (from redemption or innocence or whatever) probably comes from this subconscious fear I've developed that I've lost something important that I used to have, when I was young and even more trusting than I am now.

Plots and characters, no, mostly made up, as far as I can tell. But my subconscious leaks in, too, I guess.

PeeDee · Jul 4, 2006

Only to an extent. I mean, certain characters are people I've met, or people I've thought I've met (sometimes, you get a different view of someone when you meet them a second time, and realize that the first time, you were mostly filling them in in your head). Certain situations have been based on personal experience. For example, my next project (a YA horror book, I think) is very personal and partly true.

Mostly, though, it's just stuff I make up out of my head which is then influenced by who I am and where I've come from.

Alan Yee · Jul 4, 2006

Events? Characters? In general, no, although my current protag is similar to me in some ways, although there's huge differences. Emotions? Hell yeah, my medical condition gives me a lot of emotions, and I try to use emotions in my story/novel, as they help drive the plot and build characterization. The presence of homosexuality and bisexuality is there because of things I've noticed happen with me that gave me reason to believe I might be gay or bi. I let that into the story because I wanted to imagine what would happen if I were indeed gay or bi, and how a half-human would deal with a characteristic that he inherited from his demon ancestors.

Have I actually experienced any of that? No, I haven't. I've just pondered it as I continue to grow older and learn more about myself. I might find my sexuality to be much different from what I expected once I'm an adult. I just wrote down my vision of what would happen to me under those certain circumstances in my story.

gp101 · Jul 4, 2006

Jamesaritchie said:
In one way or another, loodely or tightly, a great deal of my fiction is based on personal experience.

I'm sure you meant "loosely", but it's more fun to think you meant "lewdly".

Storyteller5 · Jul 4, 2006

Yes, I think any themes in my work come from personal experience. I think it's inevitable to some degree. For me, write what you know really is about emotions. If I'm tying my emotions up in a piece, I'm thinking about how that applies to me on some level.

rbflynn · Jul 5, 2006

Sometimes I explore personal dilemas or experiences, but it's a very conscious thing. For instance, I'll take a dilema I am facing and transpose it onto characters in a totally different life situation than I am in and see how they handle it.

Bmwhtly · Jul 5, 2006

I don't set out to write about things from my own life (too dull to write about), but a lot of little things like character idiosyncratics come from my life. It's not intentional (most of the time), they just slip through and I usually don't realise until I read it back.
Is that wierd?

bsolah · Jul 5, 2006

Bmwhtly said:
I don't set out to write about things from my own life (too dull to write about), but a lot of little things like character idiosyncratics come from my life. It's not intentional (most of the time), they just slip through and I usually don't realise until I read it back.
Is that wierd?

No, not at all. It's perfectly natural for parts of you to seep into your characters. King says in On Writing, "When you ask yourself what a certain character would do given a certain set of circumstances, you're making the decision based on what you yourself would (or, in the case of a bad guy, wouldn't) do." Whilst I think that this isn't a set rule, I do think it applies a lot of the time.

Shweta · Jul 5, 2006

There are themes of isolation, or being outside a group or culture, or trying to integrate different cultures, that have been part of almost everything I've written. The story I'm currently working (uhhh stalled) on doesn't have those, so I was about to say that it doesn't come from personal experience.

Then I realized that, duh, it's set in the lab I've been doing research in. Down to the broken ventilation system. And the experiment my character is running is very much like the one my husband just ran.

So uh, yeah. :blush: Personal experience gets worked into my stories just a wee bit.

Solatium · Jul 5, 2006

The only thing that strikes me about my fiction is that I often default to male viewpoint characters. My (possibly cracked) explanation for this is that, as a female with no love life to speak of, I've never had the opportunity to be "feminine" in the one arena where it actually makes a difference. I am, for social purposes, sexless, so I can relate to men at least as well as to other women.

Jenan Mac · Jul 5, 2006

In the sense that "all characters are the writer", at least to a certain extent, yeah. Which makes my primary beta-reader a little nervous about the psychotic serial murderer her baby sister's written, even though I keep telling her he's an amalgam of too many nights doing emergency Baker Act intake.

AdamH · Jul 5, 2006

rosemerry said:
Does anyone else feel like their themes come from personal experience or something you have to deal with everyday?

Always.

This becomes the basis of a character or a plot or a theme. Then I let it grow from there on creativity alone.

Shadow_Ferret · Jul 5, 2006

I dont' have any themes.

Jamesaritchie · Jul 5, 2006

Theme

Shadow_Ferret said:
I dont' have any themes.

If you have a plot, you have a theme. Many writers do not start with a theme, and never, ever intentionally write around a theme, but you can't have a plot without also having a theme. If you find the theme, and tighten around it, the novel will read better, and probably sell faster.

Do you find the themes you write about come from personal experience?

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