Turning Real Life into Fiction by Kathryn Scherer

Everything that we write is informed by who we are, what we believe and what we experience. As we often say in our ACW writers’ group, whether faith is implicit or explicit in our writing, we write as Christians. Our faith underpins our work. Even if we write characters that have very different worldviews to our own, the essence of the story, the underpinning moral framework and ‘feel’ of the piece, is going to be Christian. It’s unavoidable.

And it’s one way in which real life informs our fiction.

Another way is through our experiences, particularly our emotional life. Taking what we have experienced and putting it into our fiction is what makes our writing authentic and powerful.

One of the teenage characters in my current work-in-progress has fallen out with her friends. And as I write about that broken relationship, I realise that I’m reflecting on recent events in my family life. The details are different, but the emotional fall-out is the same.

It’s a universal theme: navigating friendships and deciding when to keep working at a relationship and when to walk away. But seeing the raw emotions first hand has helped round out my writing.

But the third way in which real life can find its way into fiction is more difficult. Here we’re talking about characters and details.

At the minute, my writing is set in the world of girls’ football, which is a very familiar environment for me. And I know a lot of people in that world: players, coaches, parents. None of them feature in my book, not by name or description or role.

Alternatively, all of them feature in my book, in some form or another.

Because everyone I’ve met in that world has informed my knowledge, my impressions and my beliefs about football. And particularly if I have a character with strong views or behaviour patterns outside the norm, that character is informed by real people who hold those views / behave in that way. Sometimes I am aware of the inspiration and can deliberately ensure that I am combining characteristics and physical appearances from different people. Moulding the character until they become an amalgamation of several real people. That way I avoid anyone recognising themselves.

It’s like taking the shadow of a person and reanimating them so that their outline is still clear to me, but they have different features, family, name. They're not recognisable to anyone else.

But sometimes the inspiration is less obvious, almost subliminal. On one occasion, it wasn’t until I met a former colleague long after I’d finished writing a story that I realised how she’d found her way into that story. Fortunately it was in a positive way. And I don’t think she’d ever know.

Being inspired by the people around us is inevitable.

What do you do to ensure no one can spot themselves when they read your work?