Inspiration: Writing from Life

“Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works.” - Virginia Woolf

A few months ago in a post I wrote about finding inspiration (you can read it here) I mentioned that our own lives are rich with material for us to extract and shape into something creative. Novels like Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar demonstrate the potency of writing real things. Writing from life lends an edge to fiction, a priceless authenticity.

Having said that, I do believe though, that all writing is writing from life. Even the most fantastical writing is grounded in reality. Every character you write has an origin, however small, in your own life. The adage of ‘write what you know’ always strikes me as limiting. I prefer to think of it as a framed painting. The canvas itself could depict any number of exotic, distant, make believe images but all four corners are firmly hemmed in by a frame. The frame is your knowledge, the things you’ve observed. Whatever you write, that frame of experience is hugging it closely.

I once read about a writing tutor who said the best advice he could give his young writing students was to go out and live life; to have their hearts broken, fail at something, travel the world. I think just by simply being alive you have something to write about. We all, for instance, have been children and have known the complexities of growing up. That’s a big theme that we can instantly draw from life. But then there are also the little things – the nervous way a person plays with their food, the annoying habit another person has of correcting your pronunciation- these things add a layer of recognition for the reader.

If we all have a fountain of experience to draw from, why then are we not all writers? I think the key lies in being able to use our life experience. I think that, like painters, we writers need to practice our still life skills. Writers need to try and recreate real life on the page. One way to do this is to treat your characters as if they are real. If you do, then, strangely over time, they begin to disobey you, flout your direction and go their own way. This is when you know that you’ve created someone authentic and dynamic.

There is something empowering about using our memories and experiences for inspiration. It can be therapeutic, a sort of alchemy in which dull, difficult periods are turned into something dazzling and made meaningful on the page. That’s not to say that our characters our just fictional versions of ourselves – although they can be. They are parts of us, the people we want to be, the people we think we could have been, the people we’re afraid to be. They’re the parts of people we’ve met, the pieces of the people we love. Writing from life can be painful, healing, revealing, inspiring. Life ‘is written large’ in our stories because all writing is life.

Do you find yourself drawing from real life in your writing? Let me know in the comments below...