Bleeding into My Story

When I started to write my first children’s novel I deliberately tried not to write my story. This was difficult because I was writing quite an intimate novel about alopecia, a condition I have lived with most of my life. I valiantly placed the story in a completely different setting, different age, family, school, friends— everything was different.

But I found as I wrote that the story somehow continued to parallel with mine. No matter how I tried to make it different the heart of the story beat in time with mine. As I grew in understanding of my characters and their emotions and life experiences it became clearer that it was in fact my story. Even the names that I had chosen for my characters reflected mine, which was a bit scary to realise.

I’m writing my second children’s novel now. It’s a fantasy and a friend commented that this one would be pure fiction. As a fantasy novel it immediately marks itself outside of the realm of reality.

However, as I’ve started to write and get to know my characters I realise that once again, I’m bleeding into my story. The emotions, choices, and character traits— all of these deeper aspects of a story continue to circle around and cause me to look at myself and my own life, to dig into how I feel and what I’ve learnt.

Yes, it is a fantasy but fantasies tend to reflect reality. In fact they can do so in a deeper way than real to life stories. Fantasies have the freedom to explore scenarios and topics where a real to life story might be constrained by culture, religion or social norms.

There is an old adage that says, ‘write what you know’. In my experience this tends to happen subconsciously. I don’t set out to write my story and yet through the process of writing it turns out that I do.