Skeletons in your Writing

As Mario Vargas Llosa so eloquently put it, "Writers are the exorcists of their own demons."

Not having read all the responses I'll say this:

If you (general 'you') think your stories have nothing to do with your life, you're just wrong, plain and simple. You may not know you're doing it, but IMO that's BETTER, because it isn't contrived. It seems like your story 'came out' and then you realized what it was. This is best. Better than saying "I'm going to write a scene about how I felt when my father left my mother" because that's just self-indulgent journaling bullshit. I mean, write a memoir if you'd like but don't call it fiction.

We all write about our lives, our experiences, what we know and have seen or felt or smelled or tasted, because we cannot escape ourselves. It's illogical to believe we can separate ourselves entirely.

So yeah, I think things come up when you don't expect them. Sometimes they work their way in and you're none the wiser. Some you may not know until 10, 20, 50 years later. Some you know after the words are on the page.

I'm writing a novel based off of the world my brothers and I created when we were kids. I tell myself the characters aren't my family, that I'm changing them for the story (and that's what I tell them), but if I'm honest the truth of how I feel does come out. It's a truth I sometimes feel bad about. But it's the best stuff in the book so I have to keep it, right?

Hardship is a part of any person's life. A writer is no exception. My opinion is to go with those things because they are very honest and people can connect with those sorts of things.

My two cents:

Writing about your own life and your own struggles can be a great thing, and it will ring especially true with your readers if they can tell you're coming from a place of honesty. However, I'd shy away from writing about hard things that you may not have come to terms with yet. I'm thinking of something specific about my own life (which I'm not going to share), and I'd love to plug it into a story one day, but.....not yet. If that makes any sense.

I agree with the posts that say a little bit of the writer always gets into the story.
Personally, my and my MC have nothing in common except the love of pit-bulls.

I've noticed though in everything I've tried to write my main character has to take responsibility for something he shouldn't have too, which is something I've had to do.

I think it's all up the the writer.

The skeletons are the only thing that makes my writing worth writing.

Without them, the skin and everything else are just a flaccid shell.

I've never used personal experiences in my writing, at least not to the point I recognized them. That said, writing about bad experiences might actually have a therapeutic effect on you; why else would therapists promote talking about such events to get them off your chest.

Unless the uncomfort this causes seeps into other aspects of your life, I'd recommend you slug on through.

Some events stay with you, or they do with me. When I was seven, my favorite aunt died. She lived with us, was only twenty=one, and died at home, completely unecpectedly. Almost fifty years later, I still rmember her body, still remember having no true concept of death, wondering why we couldn't wake her up.

About six years later, their was a severe car wreck at a crossroad just half a mile down the road from our tiny country town, and some of us jumped on our bikes and arrived only a couple of minutes later. Three people were severely injured, blood was everywhere, etc.

But there was one woman, a front seat passenger, who hadn't been wearing a seat belt, and her face went through the windshield, and she was half in and half out of the car. One eye was pretty much gone, her nose was flattened into an unrecognizable pulp, her face was a bloody mess, and she was dead.

Other cars stopped, then teh poilice and ambulances arrived. The dead woman was quickly examined, and then the medics went on to treat the living. A police oficer pulled the dead woman back into the car, in roughly the same sitting position she probably had before the wreck, and covered her with a thin blanket. Blood quickly soaked trhough the blanket, and formed something of an outline of what was left of her face.

It' hard to forget something like that.

Our hoouse sat well back off the single road in town, and was surrounded by cornfields, a thick, weedy area, and a granmill that shut down at five. A railroad ran forty yards to the south. . .and for abouot five year, from teh time I was seven until I was twelve or so, we were routinely terrorized by at least two men.

They would come several times each year, peek in the windows while wearing frightening masks, bang on the doors at thre in the morning. We were country folk and still had an outhouse, and one night my great aunt made a trip out there and was attacked. We got out there in time to see her attacker running off, and she was fine, other than a ripped dress and a nasty bruise on the side of her face.

I was terrified of the night. And then, when I turned twelve, I got fed up with being afraid. I couldn't get to the twenty-two or the shotgun I owned without waking others, but I could get to a bow, so I waited until midnight, strung teh bow, and slipped out my window.

I can't beging to say how scary it was out there. I saw nothing for two night, or maybe three, and then I did see a man, nothing more than a shadow, and, God, I started shaking like you wouldn't believe. But I shot at him. A long shot, and in teh dark, but I came close enough to make him yell and take off running. . .and loud enough to wake my grandpa. . .which menat I got caught doing something pretty dumb.

But after a couple of weeks, he let me move my rifle and shotgun into my own room, and I was considerably less afraid. I went back out several times, but saw nothing.

I'd like to say it all ended there, but shortly thereafter we woke up about three in the morning on a rainy, miserable night with the house fully on fire. We barely made it out, and my mom was burned severely enough to spend more than a month in the hospital.

I can still taste that rolling black smoke that seemed alive as it curled out of the flames, and I inhaled enough to poison me, had trouble breathing for several weeks, and my entire left arm broke out in boils.

We got out with nothing except what we were wearing at the time.

You can't forget something like that, either.

As I got older, I put myself into a lot of dangerous situations, but it's those childhood memories that remain the strongest.

I think Flannery O'Connor nailed it when she said, “Anyone who survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his or her life."

This is certainly true in my case, with these events, and several others.

The events of our childhood make us what we are, shape our lives forever, and it seems, well, wasteful, not to write about them.

Wow, James, you had a dramatic childhood!

Now you've got me wondering if Flannery O'Connor actually knew people as odious as the ones in her stories. She's a wonderful writer, but I really dislike spending time with the people she writes about.