real life

I wrote the first line of my debut novel, A MILLION TINY MISSILES ALL AT ONCE, when I was nineteen years old. At that time I was really struggling and I won’t go into all of that. The point of this post is to talk about the idea of inserting real life issues into your writing. I have no idea how other people write, really, but I assume there’s always some element of real life in everyone’s work.

When I started writing my novel, I didn’t know what to write about other than the actual events that happened to me as a kid. I condensed them for timeline purposes, but as I racked up over one hundred rejections for the manuscript, I began to think that no one was really interested and maybe the story wasn’t engaging. However, when the novel finally did get published with the amazing Chicken House Books folks, I also had a realisation that people are going to be reading real things that happened to me and my family. This was a little daunting but also quite a relief in a strange way.

I don’t mind that people are aware of the odd and funny and I guess strange things that happened, but it can create interesting experiences. I was at an event where a person had read the proof of my novel and they approached me and wanted to know if the things that happened in the novel were true. I said that they were, and they replied that it made them very angry that a kid would have to go through that kind of stuff.

This was all done in a very positive way but I felt the need to defend my upbringing in a strange way because in a lot of ways I had a great childhood but I feel thta due to our circumstances we were a magnet for weird things. Throw in the fact that we lived in a small town with a lot of characters, many of them out of their minds on drugs and alcohol, and you have the possibility of some very strange and funny and tragic instances, which is what the book is about in some ways.

I think the point of this post is to highlight the fact that you do not necessarily have to write down all the personal stuff that happened to you in your life, it just seemed to fit the story I was trying to tell in that moment. I had to ask myself if the things that happened to me were actually interesting, and it turns out they were, to some people at least. I also had to be prepared for the fact that other people would read and be critical of what was essentially my life. No, it’s not a memoir, it’s a fictionalised version of things, but I guess it could be close to a memoir in some ways. 

I had to be ready that it was going to be edited and even before that I was very hesitant to let anyone read it because it was so personal. I think if you are going to write about your life in a fictionalised way you still need to be open to let others read it before you send it off to agents etc because if it does get picked up, a lot more people are going to be reading it. I think that’s it, try not to be defensive about it, even though I was very defensive for a long time and I can say that it really hindered me. Hopefully that’s helpful! Take it easy. - Lucas