I have a question for writers, but first, the background story:
A friend (let’s call her Jill), who was going through a lot of trouble with her marriage and life in general, wrote a magazine article about a city (an existing city), and how it fades and the problems it has.
Upon reading it, it was clear to some of her friends that the story was a pretty straightforward allegory about her own life and troubles.
When one of them (let’s call her Mary) asked her about it, Jill said “Uhh, no, this wasn’t an allegory, it’s just a story about the city, it is not related to my issues at all”
Mary thinks Jill is lying, and that she created the allegory knowingly and it was meant as a way to philosophize about the issues she is dealing with.
I’m not so sure. I think it may be possible that she wrote the story without consciously thinking about how it relates to her life, and maybe her subconscious was “guiding” her to write about this, as a way for her to work through her issues.
Is this possible? Have any of you writers here written something that you thought was not personal, but others pointed out to you that it does contain a lot of details that match your personal life?
Yep, it happened to me. I don’t want to disclose too much but I wrote a story where a particular type of physical trauma cropped up more than once, notably in a scene involving the main character. After I had finished it I found out that I had undergone just such a trauma when I was very young. It freaked me out rather a lot – particualary as the whole thrust of the story was discovering family secrets.
However if your friend doesn’t want to have the analogy forced on her story I’d say don’t push it.
For example, the not-really-children’s novel I used to post about here has two protagonists who were born at about the same time I was, and live in what began as fictionalized version of my neighborhood. I was careful to make the girl much more like me, in terms of personality, than the boy, and equally careful to make sure their families were both unlike the real Rhymers. Part of the way I accomplished this was by (a) writing backstories for each protagonist that made them quite different than me, and (b) deciding that the Rhymer tribe existed in this fictional universe and that we lived in between the protagonists.
ETA: My baby sister was still annoyed when she realized that she was a background character in the narrative, even though none of the faux-Rhymers had more than a line of dialogue.
I should think it would depend on how close the resemblance is.
F’instance: the female protogonist in my story is an abused child. I was abused, by current standards–hell, by my own standards, though I’ve forgiven my parents. Mostly. Anyway, though the emotional energy for telling her part of the story came from my own memories and feelings, I was very deliberate in making the details of what she went through not merely worse than what I suffered, but very different. So though my sisters would undoubtedly recognize the descriptions of the neighborhood, and the school the little girl attends, and the songs she listens to and books she reads, there’s no way they’d think I was writing about my family and just changed the gender of one person; she’s the younger child of two, her parents are professionals, etc, and so forth.
But if people see very strong similarities as you describe in the OP, I think it was most likely deliberate and she’s just not admitting it.
I could be wrong, of course. I’ve been wrong 475 times this month.
I think what 2ply was getting at with ‘write what you know’ is that to create a sense of emotion about anything in fiction you have to draw on your own feelings and experience. But I do think that Jill could have done this unintentionally. I’ve had people make similar comments about my own writing and nearly got into an argument because someone thought I was trying to send a message to them in writing that I didn’t mean at all.
It’s something that gets drilled into aspiring writers in workshops so they learn that they can create better stories by sticking to family drama or familiar geography than trying to go for some kind of action story about the CIA or something they know nothing about. Good authors do draw on their life experiences.
There was an author on NPR about a year or tow ago I forget her name, but she had just written her second novel and said it was harder than the first, because the first novel is usually an author’s life story.
“Write what you know” is actually not very good advice – it’s too restrictive by far. Better advice is: “Know what you write.” In other words, it’s okay to write about stuff you haven’t experienced – just research it thoroughly and get to know it! if you just draw on your own experiences you’re really limiting yourself rather arbitrarily.
But this is better stuff for the Lobsang thread elsewhere. To answer the OP, I think it’s certainly possible, at least as described. If I understand correctly, your friend was writing an allegory about a city and only when others read it did they spot the parallels to her life? I don’t see why that couldn’t have happened. Especially if she’s not the, um, most psychologically aware person in the world.
As far as whether I’ve done this myself… well, most of my characters do have elements of me in them, even the scumbags who hypothetically shouldn’t resemble me at all ('cause I’m such a sweetheart in real life! :D). And yeah, I’ve used a lot of biography. That stuff is all quite conscious.
Sometimes, however, I have gone back and reread older material and thought: uh, wow, is it me or are there an awful lot of screwed up female characters? And how come they all have such parental issues? It’s not that I didn’t realize that there were some biographical or psychological similarities at the time I wrote the storylines, but the recognition that there’s an ongoing pattern of behavior has indeed slapped me in the face unawares – after the fact.
Not sure if this makes any sense, but I guess the answer to the OP question is: yes, sorta.
Yes. My story, “The Transformation,” was about a woman who had trouble dealing with the fact that her husband had been given a robotic body after an accident. She has an affair and is thinking of leaving him, but decides in the end to give him another chance.
When I wrote it, it was just me following an interesting story idea and trying to come up with a good resolution.
After it sold and was published, I reread it and realized it was a wish-fulfillment fantasy about the breakup of my first marriage. It actually metaphorically covers the real reasons, but with a happy ending.
Normally, I don’t put my personal life in my stories (other than using places I’ve been to as background), but in this case I had even though I didn’t realize it.
Shortly after my parents separated following a marriage of 26 years, my mother sent me a story to critique which strongly paralleled what I had observed of the last years of their marriage, and in which, although it was sort of vague, it was clear to me that the male protagonist died nastily at the end. (Vague enough that other people thought he’d just gone away, but I know my mother’s writing.)
I was unable to get sufficient critical distance from the story to give her any meaningful feedback, except to boggle, laugh hysterically, and then write her a bracing email on why that wasn’t OK to send to her daughter. She had absolutely no idea that the story was about her and Dad, although the lightbulb popped on as soon as I pointed it out. She confirmed the death at the end of the story and apologized profusely for sending it. I told her it was fine, as I fully intend to use the incident quite consciously in my writing one day.
Joe Haldeman told that once he had assigned one of his stories, “More than the Sum of His Parts” to one of his English classes at MIT. It’s a story about a man who is injured and gets a cybernetic penis (and it’s as funny as the description might indicate).
After the students read it, he asked what they thought the story was about. One student said, “It’s about your experience in Vietnam.” (Haldeman had fought and been wounded). Haldeman was about to correct him, but realized the student had been right.
There was also the story Isaac Asimov told about sitting in on an English class discussing his work and telling the professor that, no, he hadn’t intended any of the things the professor said he had. The professor replied “How do you know what you intended?” This does show arrogance on the part of the professor, but Asimov also discovered that there are things a writer puts into a story that he or she is unaware of.
BTW, “write what you know” is not good advice. “Write what you love” is better.
What does this have to do with the question in the OP?