by
Stephen Leigh
I’ve already written in these posts for Wild Cards about how I consider “Write what you know” to be equally good advice and yet horribly, terribly wrong. But let me expand on that concept one more time, in order to get into the subject de jour—how to use traits from your own experiences to embellish your fiction.
You see, the issue is that most of use can’t only write ‘what we know’ without ending up writing the same story over and over again. That’s boring. Really, really boring. Given that I write speculative fiction, I’ve never lived in a fictional world of medieval high fantasy and neither have I lived in an imagined future on some distant planet. Therefore, I can’t possibly be ‘writing what I know.’ Instead, I have to deploy my imagination and copious research to compensate. But…
Here’s something every writer can (and if they’re smart) will generally do: borrow/steal from personal experiences and use those memories to add details and and verisimilitude to their fiction. A reader can feel it when you’re have some actual life experience in what you’re relating—it resonates in the words you use and the images you give them.
In my case, my early published stories and my first novels reflected my interest and experience in fencing and edged weapons. Later novels and stories would likewise draw on my years and decades learning the martial art of aikido (an ongoing journey). My best friend in college, who would also become the best man at my wedding to Denise, came out as gay back in the very early 1970s, when it absolutely wasn’t safe to do so for several reasons. I was impressed by Earl’s courage in facing the potential backlash from family, friends, and society in general, and that Earl trusted me and Denise enough to have come out to us. Ever since, I’ve scattered occasional gay characters in my fiction as a small tribute to him—because Earl made me realize that other people around me, more than I would have realized without Earl pulling aside the curtains, shared his secret life.
In 1983 and 1988, respectively, Denise and I produced our two children (well, Denise produced them; I just provided the starter fluid). Any of you reading this who already have children already know this: having offspring will necessarily change your perspective as a person and as a writer—if it doesn’t, you must live in some alternate universe. Megen, our first-born, would end up affecting my approach to writing novels. I no longer wanted to write main characters who were only like me (a cisgender, largely heterosexual, politically liberal Anglo). I wanted Meg to be able to read my books and see people with whom she could identify and imagine herself in their place—which was the same thing I’d done when I started reading sf and fantasy. In the timeframe of the 1950s and 60s, that was a trivial task for a cisgender, largely heterosexual Anglo male, since the stories and novels of the time (largely written by white males) were essentially littered with protagonists whose romantic inclinations were toward cisgender, largely heterosexual women. But I know that wasn’t the case for other readers.
After Megen’s birth, the majority of my novels would feature (at the very least) female protagonists. When Megen bravely came out to us in high school as gay, my protagonists/characters also started to reflect her LGBTQIA+ sensibilities. In real life, Meg married a woman whom Denise and I also love very much (hi, Loni!), and so some of my fictional protagonists have had similar relationships. FWIW, Meg also took up my interest in fine art and has far surpassed me in her accomplishments, a fact of which I’m very proud. In fact, she has a gallery show of her paintings and drawings in Columbus that starts on May 14th of this year. I’m incredibly proud of her growth as an artist.
Devon, our second-born, has also had his own unique effect on my writing, largely in the Wild Cards universe. From the beginning, Devon was an intense and somewhat obsessive child. In fact, it was Devon’s unrelenting insistence that I must write a ‘real fantasy’ (since he preferred reading that genre to science fiction) that started me writing what would become the “Cloudmages Trilogy” (HOLDER OF LIGHTNING, MAGE OF CLOUDS, and HEIR OF STONE, all under my ‘S.L. Farrell’ pseudonym.) Those three became the first of several books I did for DAW: which included another trilogy under the Farrell pseudonym and six more books under my own name.
In 1999, Disney released their animated Tarzan movie, featuring a soundtrack by Phil Collins. Denise and I took Devon to see it, and Devon immediately decided he wanted to become a drummer (an impulse on which he followed through). He’s become a damn fine percussionist who makes his living from playing and teaching music, something I couldn’t quite manage to do myself. So when Tor Books revived the WC series and I needed to create new characters, one of those was Michael Vogali, aka Drummer Boy or DB, a six-armed joker was body also served as a drum set—a tribute to Devon’s passion for drumming.
But… I will point out that DB is not Devon. DB has some severe character flaws which Devon doesn’t share. As I said above, I borrow from personal experiences to provide details and add verisimilitude to my fiction, but I also change the character so he or she isn’t recognizable as any one specific person. Same with those female protagonists I also mentioned above; they may have certain attributes of Megen, but none of them are Megen, just as DB is not Devon.
Using your personal experiences doesn’t mean the characters are you.
My first character for WILD CARDS was Gregg Hartmann, the politician also known as Puppetman. I knew a particularly charismatic and charming person at the time, so I borrowed those attributes and crafted a dangerous new character who had the same properties, but who (over many of the first several books in the series) would do terrible things with the abilities the wild card virus gave him.
A couple pertinent side notes: in 1988, as I was writing Puppetman’s sequences for Wild Cards VI: Ace in the Hole, I had Puppetman cause his pregnant wife Ellen to fall down a staircase and lose the child in her womb. Denise, at the time, was heavily pregnant with Devon. Denise usually reads my first drafts, but I refused to let her read that scene. I didn’t want her to think or even imagine that I would consider doing anything like that… even if I could obviously imagine it.
Then, in 2003, long after Puppetman’s creation, I noticed campaign signs here locally for a Greg Hartman (without the additional consonants), running for—and winning—the Clerk of Courts position. I was afraid that I’d somehow shifted into an alternate universe and was about to be paid back, painfully, for my sins as a writer. But this Greg Hartman bore no resemblance to my Gregg Hartmann: he was a Republican, not a Democrat, and has remained a local politician, not a national one. Thank goodness; I really would have worried, otherwise, that I might have somehow brought Puppetman into our reality.
Likewise Bloat, the enormous joker who ruled the Rox, came about at least partially from my time running a fantasy role-playing game—but like most characters, Bloat was based on no one particular person but was an amalgamation of several. The same is true of most of my WC characters as well as those in my other stories and novels: Gimli/ aka Tom Miller, who was based on several dwarves I played in fantasy RPGs; the Oddity, a fusion of a thruple, three lovers about which I’ll say no more here; Jerusha Carter, aka Gardener, whose origin was based on my frustration with keeping plants alive; the jokers Cosmos and Chaos who were (very loosely) based on my time as part of juggling comedy duo with Ro Nagey under the same name… and so on.
Another quick aside re. Cosmos and Chaos. After C&C’s performance at the Baltimore worldcon, George came up and asked if he could have our script. Ro and I both looked at each other and chuckled; George looked confused. Ro handed him a single sheet of paper, marked with cues for Frank Johnson, our stage manager: what music to play when and what props to bring out. Otherwise, the paper was empty of anything resembling a dialogue or a script. Heck, we never had anything scripted—pretty much everything we did on stage was improvised in the moment.
I’m certain I’m not the only WC writer to have borrowed from genuine life experiences. After all, inside the shell of the Great & Powerful Turtle lurks the nerdy Thomas Tudbury, who shares some attributes with the young George RR Martin. The joker-centaur Dr. Finn was created by Melinda Snodgrass, who is an accomplished equestrian. My bet is that other WC writers would have similar tales to tell about their own fictional creations. I’ll leave it to all of you to ask them.
Look at it this way: I love doing research for stories and novels, and I’ve learned how to do that fairly well. It’s a necessity because research is sometimes the only way to give a character a feeling of genuine life. But I maintain that you should still imbue your main characters (and perhaps even the supporting players) with a few genuine experiences from your own life, if only to make them well-rounded and even more believable.
They still won’t be you, and that’s fine. Unless you’re writing autobiography, that’s not what you want. But they should contain some part of you—that’s what helps the reader believe in them as a character, and that’s what you’re after as a writer.
In my opinion, anyway. Feel free to disagree!