A question of self

[John Dean]

Interested how one issue keeps coming back time and time again for the writers using this site - and it is one that fascinates me. The question asks how much of ourselves do we place into our fiction? It's back at the top of our forums sections at the Global Short Story Competition's social networking site after one of the members started a discussion on the subject. A similiar discussion that we had a few weeks ago was equally fascinating.

My personal view has always been that, as writers, we cannot avoid but put something of our self into stories. For me, my own experiences spark ideas for stories. An example; my novel The Secrets Man, which comes out in September, was prompted by my experiences visiting a hospital ward two winters ago and watching the effect that dementia has on people. It's not the story of the people I met, it's a work of fiction, but I am in there somewhere. However, I know other writers who would recoil at the thought and insist on keeping a distance between fiction and self.

If you want to join the debate, you can follow this link to www.globalwriters.net