(Tune in to Writing Wednesdays on the next few Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays for the continuation of the series “Using Your Real Life in Fiction” — and for more of The Knowledge‘s backstory.) We were talking in the previous post about making the stakes of our real-life story life and death. Sometimes that’s hard to do. As writers working with our real lives as material, we can be naturally reluctant, say, to kill off a character we actually know. Our ex-husband? Our boss? Our mom? I’m sure you’re ahead of me on this. I’m about to say, “Kill ’em dead.” Whack ’em. Knock…

(Tune in to Writing Wednesdays on the next few Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays for the continuation of the series “Using Your Real Life in Fiction” — and for more of The Knowledge‘s backstory.) Our Most Dreaded Outcome in crafting fiction based on our real lives is that the story will be too internal, too ordinary, too boring. Life is internal. Life is ordinary. Life is boring. And don’t forget our first axiom of the Lit Biz: Nobody Wants To Read Your Sh*t. How can we make our real-life story dramatic, involving, and exciting? I’ll answer by quoting my old mentor Ernie Pintoff: “Have a body…

(Tune in to Writing Wednesdays on the next few Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays for the continuation of the series “Using Your Real Life in Fiction” — and for more of The Knowledge‘s backstory.) Let’s talk about the inciting incident in The Knowledge. It’s an interesting question because how do you identify an inciting incident in your real life? Is there a true, real-world event? Do you make it up? And if you do, how do you know what to make up? The inciting incident in The Knowledge comes on page 29, the first page of “Book Two, The Turk.” Everything before that is…

(Tune in to Writing Wednesdays on the next few Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays for the continuation of the series “Using Your Real Life in Fiction” — and for more of The Knowledge‘s backstory.) Two paragraphs on pages 140-141 are what The Knowledge was about for me. That was the payload. The other 273 pages are just the narrative architecture to carry what’s in those few lines. Remember our earlier series on this blog called “Why I Write?” My biggest reason, at least for my early (unpublished) books, was I was writing out of pain. Pain and guilt. Pain and remorse. I can’t prove…

(Tune in to Writing Wednesdays this Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for the continuation of the series “Using Your Real Life in Fiction” — and for more of The Knowledge‘s backstory.) The problem with real life is it’s messy. It doesn’t fit into neat categories. But if you and I are going to use our real lives as material for fiction, we have to do just that. We have to wrangle it. We have to bring it under control. We have to pick a story category, i.e. a genre, and make our real-life narrative work within that genre. Or put another way, we…

(Tune in to Writing Wednesdays this Friday and Monday for the continuation of the series “Using Your Real Life in Fiction” — and for more of The Knowledge‘s backstory.) When we as writers use our real life in fiction, we tend to use real-life personalities too. One of the big ones in The Knowledge is my cat, Teaspoon. My real-life cat was named Mo. I changed the name for a reason, which I’ll get into below. But first let’s flash back [see Chapter 52 in Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh*t] to one of the seminal principles of story-telling: Every character must…

  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…

Today we start a multi-part series on using your real life in fiction. The example I’m going to use is my own newest novel, The Knowledge. We’ll bounce back and forth from story principles in the abstract to how these concepts were applied in The Knowledge. I’m gonna put up a new post every Mon-Wed-Fri, just for this series. Hopefully we’ll run through Christmas. If you have any questions, please feel free to write them in to the Comments section below. I’ll answer them as best I can. Ready? Let’s start with what was honest-to-God, real-life true in The Knowledge:…

Today my newest novel, The Knowledge, goes on sale. (Yeah, that’s me in the photo, taken in the same era in which The Knowledge is set.) You can order The Knowledge right here in a premium “French flap” trade paperback edition not available anywhere else. Also in eBook or an eBook-plus-paperback bundle. There’s a special Holiday Bonus available too. The Knowledge is my (real-life) writer’s coming-of-age story. I’m the protagonist. The internal story is all true. The Knowledge takes place in New York City in 1974, when I was driving a cab and struggling to get my first novel published.…