Hi, I was wondering what your opinions are on using life experiences (negative or positive) for inspiration for writing fiction and poetry and also what advice you would give to a writer doing this.
I meant things like depression ect. I didn't know how to put this across without sounding like I was moaning.
As everyone else said, everything an author experiences can and generally is used when it comes to writing any sort of fiction. To create emotion, you need to, generally, understand it.
When my Grandpa died I wrote a story about grief. It was the most honest piece I'd ever written, and I still regard it as one of my stronger works despite a year's worth of growth. Writing is all about getting close and there's nothing that can accomplish that better than having lived a bit of the tale yourself- love, loss, betrayal, hope, anxiety, and fear, are the experiences with which we temper our stories.
I think all writers do that, to some extent. Both good and bad experiences. And I think it makes the books better. If you know about something it's easier to write about it. But sometimes you need to take a step aside from yourself and fictionalize it. I've heard a writing friend talk about that. She wrote a book about a personal trauma that she's been carrying along all her life, and at one point she said it came out really bad and read like a newspaper article or something. Only when she decided to make it a novel instead of a memoir (Not sure about the right lable here, autobiography, memoir?) she was able to write about it like a story, as something that would appeal to a reader. Sometimes it's also necessary to deal with things and get some distance to them to be able to write about them.
