Writing Fiction from Personal Experience

When life gives you lemons, write about it.

Authors often draw from their own life experiences in order to write their stories. When it comes to writing fiction, many may want to delve into their own psyche and use personal experiences in their stories, however, it may be challenging to balance a fictional story with a personal memoir. How do we tell fictional stories without them becoming an autobiography? Here are some tips on writing fiction from personal experiences!

“All fiction has to be as honest as it can be.”

Neil Gailman , Masterclass (Youtube).

For centuries we have used stories as a way to share information as well as cautionary tales. As storytellers, using personal experience can show a familiar path while still allowing space for unique storytelling. Effectively written personal stories can create a sense of relatability to readers and while fiction benefits from being authentic, despite its location, channeling the truth can blur the line between a fiction story and a memoir, especially when set in another world. 

Identify the Experience

Writing from personal experience requires one to understand the experience itself. Look into the specific event, whether it is personal or historical. Try studying the emotions felt during the experience. Take time to process your experience fully, to identify events, emotions, actions, and reactions that took place before, during, and after the event. Ask yourself whether it was short-lived or had a lasting effect.  Consider using emotion wheels as a guide if you have trouble identifying core emotions, as these will most likely be reflected on to the readers. By understanding your experiences, you can build a stronger, more impactful premise to your narrative. “Barefoot Gen” is Keiji Nakazawa’s manga semi-autobiographical story which explains the author’s history with the survival of the bombing of Hiroshima. The core experience is the actual aftermath of the bombing and its effect on Gen, focusing on loss, grief, and hopelessness. The story incorporates elements of fiction but still draws from real world situations, making it easier for the audience to empathize with the main character.

Make it the starting point, not the end

Once you have identified the core experience with its surrounding emotions, deviate from the main story. In fiction, unless historic or autobiographical, it is not recommended to reproduce the events word by word. Instead, you can take aspects of reality and mold them into the foundation of the story. Starting with the emotional experience, you are able to establish the sense of reality within the story, yet letting the experience through your characters dictate the story itself. Researching and/or incorporating factual elements within your personal experience can give out a new perspective and add depth to the story. Even if you might not use all these facts, research is always helpful. Using double perspective is telling the story as it happened as opposed to your post-experience insights. Tim O’Brian well illustrates “story truth vs happening truth” in his book The Things They Carried, as it narrates the same overarching story through the expirences of many different men. It can be challenging to avoid simply retelling the narrative as it occurred, and in such cases, you might want to try out the “What if?”. “What if?” is looking at your story and finding ways to tell it by changing from minor details to its whole setting. Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples’s Saga explores the themes of parenthood, families, love, and war within the context of multiple nations living on different planets and traveling through space. 

Characters and Setting

Characters are essential elements of any story, as they provide the motivations, backstory, and actions that drive the narrative forward. You might still play the “What if?” game in order to imagine how your story can play out in a different world or with non-human characters. However, it is important to remember that the way these characters interact and are molded by each other, their environment, and the situation they are in will take charge of writing the experience similar to the real event. While inserting yourself as a character might be tempting, it can hinder the character’s development depending on the story you tell. It is crucial to avoid using the real names of people you know from your personal life, as without consent, they can lead to legal issues, especially if the character is depicted negatively. In order to make characters more compelling and relatable to readers, make them complex, filled with both flaws and virtues. Exploring the story through different perspectives can give depth to your story and provide a better understanding to your reader. Using characters to navigate the gray areas of the story instead of simply presenting events as black or white, can make the story and experience much more realistic and compelling for your reader. 

“You do not write your life with words, you write it with actions.”

Patrick Ness (A Monster Calls).

Write your story from afar

The best way to write your story based on personal experiences is to remove yourself from the story. It may seem contradictory, but by doing so, you avoid preaching the message and allow the story to unfold by itself. Treating the experience as a separate entity gives the opportunity to approach the story with fresh eyes and explore it in new and unexpected ways. To stay objective, look into how the story might impact a larger audience and approach it from all angles. Instead of preaching to your audience, allow your characters to explore on their own and make readers live the experience through their eyes. Shirley Jackson says it best,  “I delight in what I fear”.  Looking through uncharted waters will lead to a wide discovery and a richer story.

Go through edits

Editing your story is a must in any form of writing. It is easy to fall into the trap of preaching your experience or writing with personal bias, after all, you lived through it. That is why having another pair of eyes can help catch any of these issues and offer another perspective. This is especially important if they were also there during the real event, as they might have seen it differently. Writing fiction based on personal experience requires a balance between storytelling, objectivity, and using your characters to guide the narrative. With the help of self-editing and those of others, you can make sure that the story is clear, relatable, engaging, and authentic. 

The HoneyDripper is the Savannah College of Art and Design’s juried comics and illustration blog, dedicated to publishing, promoting, and showcasing the finest in student work.​