Almost all the writing books tell you to write what you know - to seed your fantasies with just enough reality to make your reader believe your story could be true, so that they suspend disbelief for the duration of the novel.
Sometimes writers do it so well that readers get quite cross when they find your book wasn't based on a real person. They feel cheated that it really was fiction.
Shirley Conran, interviewed in The Observer last Sunday about her novel "Lace", which is marking its 30th birthday with a reprint," admitted that it was really "intensely researched sexual information dressed up as a novel" with all the characters based on real people - people she knew well. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jul/29/shirley-conran-interview-lace-republished For those of us that remember the advent of "Lace" - of course most of us would only admit to being at school then, hiding it in brown paper inside our schoolbags - the interview is worth a read, even if only to learn how writing what you know can sell 3 million copies!
In my latest book, I've written very closely about what I know, though I would be prepared to bet $3million that it won't sell as many copies. I've written about finding my birth mother and the brothers and sister who never knew I existed, and what that was like for all of us - for my two mothers, especially, and for me.
Imagine what it's like meeting for the first time in your entire lifetime someone who looks just like you. Imagine what it's like when you've always been the odd one out, the short squat one, surrounded by model-material women, and you are suddenly among other shorties who have the same smile, the same chin, the same laugh even. That's my birth mother on the left on her wedding day. People say she looks a lot like me at that age. In some ways, I've gained a sense of belonging I never had before. All because of genes. And writing what you know.
Writing about finding my mother, and her whole embracing, wonderful family, has helped me come to understand what it means for me - and for them - to find them at last. Because, after all, I'm no spring chicken! It's taken me the best part of a lifetime, and it was a book that needed to be written.
It's called autobiographical fiction and I studied it quite a lot last year when I was at the Victoria University "Manhire" writing course as it used to be known (Will they call it the Wilkins course from next year I wonder?)
Some of the world's top authors have dabbled in autobiographical fiction - authors as great as AS Byatt, Margaret Drabble, Charles Dickens of course (David Copperfield follows his creator's life very closely), JM Coetzee... Possibly every author has taken from real life - even the ones that deny it vehemently. And now me.
