- How do your family experiences translate into writing scenes?
I could write a book about this topic. My current WIP is set in a Mennonite Community in South Central Kansas. Where my grandparents and mother and many relatives all came from. I didn't use family characters (well, one), but the culture and ethos of the town that I was familiar with as a child.
I took one of my mother's adventures in the 1920's and wrote a book (not yet published) about it. Just loosely based on her. But it was such fun and my husband and I made a trip to California and saw the house where she lived and some of the scenes where the book took place.
I wrote a novel (Festival Madness) about the Burning Man experience. My oldest son lives nearby and I've visited him and the festival three times. Even got a poem out of it.
My latest book was partly inspired by #2 son who went to scout camp and worked there for years in Northern Wisconsin. We visited our kids at camp and it always seemed like a special place. So I wrote Murder In the North Woods. No family in this book, but again, we spent a week doing research and I found a wealth of places to set scenes from a garage apartment to a huge modern house on a lake to a cottage and even a shoe company (I worked in the shoe industry for many years).
They say "write what you know," advice I've followed for all my books. I set my first novel, The Shadow Warriors in my husband's home town in Germany. Second novel, World of Mirrors came about after a vacation on a Baltic Island. Everything I write is somehow related to places or landscapes that speak to me. Short stories are also fair game. My husband's life as a young man and my life as a young girl have all gone into my short stories. I even dragged bmy father into one, but no one will ever know.
Here are some accomplished writers who will have their own interesting take on family and writing.
Anne Stenhouse http://annestenhousenovelist.wordpress.com
Connie Vines http://mizging.blogspot.com
Skye Taylor http://www.skye-writer.com/blogging_by_the_sea
Marci Baun http://www.marcibaun.com/blog
Diane Bator http://dbator.blogspot.ca/
Victoria Chatham http://www.victoriachatham.com
Rhobin L Courtright http://www.rhobincourtright.com
Posts
