How to mine your real life to create great fictional stories

I’ve had a lot of clients who used their own lives as the starting point for their fiction story. They aren’t writing memoirs or autobiographies. They’re using a moment, a feeling, a person, an experience from their own lives as a starting point from which they spin a tale. Many successfully published authors will tell you they do this, too. Our lives are great fodder for fiction.

There are three tips to keep in mind that can help make it easier to use your own life in your fiction.

1. Remember, you’re writing fiction!

Once you’ve written down the heart of the story you want to tell, pulled from real events and people the essence of why you thought this story was interesting enough for its own book, it’s time to abandon reality. You don’t have to be true to your memory of events. You can—and for the sake of your story, you should—minimize, exaggerate, falsify, rearrange, take creative liberties, and just plain make things up. Because that’s fiction. Here are some more reminders about what you can and should fictionalize when you’re writing from your life and memories.

2. Change characters’ traits, physical features, speech patterns, actions

Both of the next two tips stem from tip one. Remembering that you’re writing a work of fiction, I suggest changing the characters, especially the ones you pulled from real life, the ones based on people you know, especially if the resemblance is unmistakable.

In part, I make this recommendation simply to avoid questions of libel or even just pissing people off or hurting their feelings. Even with the best of intentions, we can’t control how others interpret our interpretations and portrayals of them. So it’s best to avoid any likeness.

Beyond keeping your relationships intact, the truth is that real people are usually not especially interesting. Most people strive for normalcy, average-ness. At least with respect to our sociability and how we interact in the world. But book characters usually aren’t average. And they don’t act “normal.” This is often the whole reason their story is interesting. A not-normal person has to figure out how to get along in a world that wants them to fit in. So it’s in your story’s best interest for you to exaggerate or amplify character traits—good traits and bad ones—to add or take away characteristics and goals and motivations and habits and etc. that may or may not exist in the real-life person who is the basis for your character.

You might make a character exceedingly more naïve than the young cousin you based the character on. Or you might make a character quick to anger, something not true of the neighbor who inspired your character. Or maybe you start with a teenager who’s always listening to their headphones and make the character a virtuoso musician who, as it turns out, is constantly studying technique by listening to masters on his cell phone. You see how you can start with a person in mind, but then veer wildly away from the real person to a character that has a story to tell or at least a part to play in a larger story.

3. Change the timeline or sequence of events for the best dramatic punch

Real life moves slowly. I once applied to a job in May and didn’t find out I’d got the job until August. There was no communication in the interim. If I was writing a story about a character who royally screws up at a new job, I might want to make the application process very short, so that we quickly reach the meat of the story—the character doing the job poorly.

On the other hand, I might want to exaggerate the timing and the drama of a character waiting to hear if they will get their dream job at last—as I did above: it really was just one month between interview and receiving a contract via email.

More than just shortening or lengthening timelines, you can play with sequencing. Did you lead your high school basketball team to a nail-biter state championship win your junior year? And then not make the finals in your senior year? But you want to write a story about a big, meaningful, dramatic state championship win? Ok. Then the events of the story you write can take place in the character’s senior year. Hey, you could even have the team in your story win both years! I admit, though, that that story would be slightly less heroic.

One last note on the sequencing or timing of events. We’ve all experienced humorous gaffs, or painful loss, and other events we think would make good scenes in a story. It’s okay to use them out of context, out of order, etc. I had a friend in high school who was ridiculously clumsy, if you let her tell it. She would sit us down and tell a string of stories that exemplified her clumsiness, and that had us wailing with laughter. But the truth was these events didn’t happen one after another in a given day. They were funny largely because she told them as if it they had. It was like watching a physical comedy sketch or cartoon where the character steps on one rake after another. But really my friend had simply relayed to us a series of clumsy actions that had happened over the last few years. Similarly, in your writing, if you’re pulling funny or tearful or dramatic events from your life, you can have them all happen to your character in the span of your story, whether it’s a day, a week, a school year or whatever. They can occur in whatever order you want, such that they are raising the stakes and the tension as the story progresses. And you can downplay or exaggerate them as fits your story.

4. Change the setting, time, or place

Thanks to my dad for reminding me this is another way to distance your fictional story from the real-life event(s) that inspired it. A romantic marriage proposal might be more romantic at the top of the Eiffel tower than at the observation deck of a fourty story building in Portland, Oregon. That doesn’t mean the marriage proposal you witnessed in (miraculously) sunny downtown Portland wasn’t utterly romantic, but for the sake of your story, a venue change to Paris might be warranted.

You might also shift your story so it takes place in 2020, instead of 1970 when it really happened to your parents. For kids, any story that takes place twenty years ago or more* is historical fiction. So, yes, your high school graduation is historical. Hey, me too, friends, me too. So if you don’t want your story classified as historical, then change the time it takes place, add modern technology, and use modern language and terminology and sensibilities.

*Consider that if you’re writing middle grade, your readers are up to 12 years old. So anything that happened about 10 years ago (if they start forming accessible memories at 2) will feel like history to them. That means that a book published today, 2020, but set in 2010, will probably not feel contemporary to that child. All the more so now given how fast technology advances these days.

A real example of turning your life into fiction

I once had a client whose book had a romantic plot and I suggested there should be a hint of romance between the girl protagonist and her boy buddy. To give the readers an alternate romantic option, make them wonder if their preferred main squeeze will win the day.

She said, “But that did happen.” To which I replied, somewhat loudly, “It’s fiction!”

She laughed at my admonishment, I’m thankful to say. And she acknowledged that the added tension did fit the story she wanted to tell, even if it wasn’t the way her real-life high school romantic encounter, which the story was lightly based on, had played out.

And, I think in the end, she had fun fantasizing and writing about how she might’ve responded if she’d had two potential suiters vying for her attention. Which is exactly what her readers will do, it’s exactly what they want from their reading—a safe way to fantasize about an abnormal or extraordinary life.

One last example of how to mine your real life for a completely fictionalized story

A friend’s son—we’ll call him David Otterfield, Davy for short—brought home a sick turtle he’d found while out exploring a creek near their home. They had an unused aquarium, so they set the turtle up with a little bed, some food, and a lamp. It was eventually revived and released back in the creek where it had been found. It wasn’t a dramatic recovery or release. It’s a turtle, after all. But there’s a germ of a story in that.

But, perhaps I don’t want to tell my friend’s child’s story. It’s his story to tell, after all. Plus, I’m not keen on Ok, what if all I kept was a child finds a sick animal, brings it home, and attempts to nurse it back to health. But not a turtle. Maybe I want it to be a humorous story, so I need a change, an exaggeration that aids that goal. A frog? A frog that appears not even to be alive? A frog that unexpectedly, and maybe suddenly, lives. Maybe a very big frog, a bullfrog, and it jumps out of the aquarium the child had kept it in and jumps all over the house causing havoc. Now we have a readable story. And it’s not the real life situation at all.

A confession: Two things in my original turtle story are true—there was a child, and there was a turtle—but they didn’t happen at the same time. I used two different animal rescue stories to create this example, because I didn’t want to expose anyone. Also, the original stories weren’t that interesting (also they both ended sadly.) You see how we can start with just a seed, one element, from our lives and then turn it into something delightful to read. Better than reality.

So go ahead and use events from your life to get started. Maybe you write an outline of events that really happened. After that, the only limit is your imagination.