Daddy's Christmas Angel

Friday, August 9, 2013

Using Personal Experiences in Crafting Your Book


"The Writer's Life - Using Personal Experiences in Crafting Your Book" is the topic I'll be covering in a workshop for the Hanover Book Festival on Saturday. I always seem to pull in personal experiences when I'm writing a book. Why not? After all, who can be a better expert on a happening than the person directly involved?

All of my novels have a spark of an actual experience that inspired them. That's especially true of Night Watch, my story set in Trinidad. We traveled to this nation located off of Venezuela a few years ago for a vacation at a resort located on a small off-shore island. The people who met our plane looked a little shady, and as we traveled along a dark road in the middle of the night, I became more and more convinced we were being kidnapped. More and more things happened that added to our adventure that eventually became part of the adventure of the characters in my book.

Even in my novel, Jungle Jeopardy, I found inspiration from my own experiences. We were visiting the Maya Ruins in Palenque when I found a remote temple ruin with no one else around. When I stared in wonder across the vast jungle that stretched far into Guatemala, I was inspired by all that had gone before, by all of the lost structures hidden beneath impossible foliage, by all the secrets that might lie forever lost. I thought of the possibility of one such place that might be uncovered to become a hiding place for a lost treasure.

We are writers. Our imaginations are always humming. That's why it's so much fun to use real life events as parts of the stories we write.

What about you? Do you use personal experiences in crafting your book?


5 comments:

Murees Dupè said...

It sounds like you have had scary, but wonderful experiences. You are wise to use them in your writing. I haven't experienced anything that interesting, but maybe I should allow my personal experiences to infiltrate my writing. Thank you for the great suggestion.

Julie Flanders said...

I don't think my personal experiences have been interesting enough to include LOL. This sounds like a great workshop - good luck with it. :)

Linda Lyons-Bailey (for GBM4cure) said...

Heh heh. Bob used to be a PI. Nothing but personal experiences there!

Hilary Melton-Butcher said...

Hi Monti .. enjoy the Conference today ... telling stories to give analogies just makes so much sense for the writer .. for any of - it's what we do all the time ..

Happy times - Hilary

Notes Along the Way with Mary Montague Sikes said...

Murees, thank you for commenting. Even if your experiences don't seem terribly exciting, you can always embellish them to bring more life to your stories.

Julie, thanks!

Linda, wow! What a resource for writing! Thanks for visiting.

Hilary, thank you. You share your stories beautifully on your blog!