Oops, I lied again. I promised we’d get into the Seven Principles of using your real life in fiction. But again I’m gonna jump forward to a critical corollary:   Don’t be afraid to fictionalize.   I used to be. I thought if I made stuff up, that would be lying. Being untrue to real life. I would read Henry Miller and Ernest Hemingway and think, “See, they’re telling the truth! Everything they’re writing is real! That’s why it works! That’s what I’ve gotta do!” Of course they were fictionalizing. They were exaggerating. They were heightening reality. The trick…

  [Continuing our new Mon-Wed-Fri series, “Using Your Real Life in Fiction” … ] I said last week that we would go through the seven principles of using your real life in fiction. But on second thought, we’d better skip to Principle #7 and study it first. It’s by far the most important.   Detach yourself from the character that is “you.”   The first three novels I wrote (all unpublished and unpublishable) were excruciatingly autobiographical. I was the central character. Everything was about me. But what made them unbearable to read was that the real-life me, the writer, was…