And this is me

[John Dean]

I am working on my latest crime novel for The Book Folks and, as is often the case, I am drawing on incidents witnessed in my own life. Not re-telling the stories but using them to inspire my fictional plots.

For me, it helps to provide a sense of authenticity if I have some sort of experience of what I am writing about. As the old adage goes, ‘write about what you know’.

Of course, I have not experienced everything but I do find that dipping into my life is helpful. Not all writers take that approach, though. Some prefer to produce work based entirely on fiction, deriving its power from sheer imagination without drawing on personal experience and revealing too much of themselves in the process.

However, for many other writers, there cannot be fiction without a sense of themselves in it. There is always part of them peering through, providing glimpses of their fears, hopes and their aspirations, revealing something about their take on life.

They may not say ‘and this is me’ anywhere in the text but they are present all the same; in there somewhere are tantalising glimpses of what they really think of the world.

And which approach is the correct one to take? Well,  as ever, it’s the one that works for each writer