There are a lot of components that go into the writing of a fictional story. It’s a fuse of everything from research, inspiration, imagination, and getting into headspaces apart from your own. It’s also well known that writers are often guilty of putting parts of themselves into the story that they are writing. Audiences who maybe know the writer on a personal level would be able to detect those parts.
And then there are the parts that are also the writer putting themselves in, but it’s not as obvious. Why? Because these might be unspoken parts of themselves that, perhaps, not even the people who know them well will catch. It varies from writer to writer, but ultimately, it depends on just how open they are as a person.
So why do it then? Why not express these parts of oneself in regular, everyday life, yet infuse them into the fiction that is being crafted? Again, it depends on who you ask. For me, I express the unspoken parts of myself in my writing because more often than not, writing can be a funnel for expressing the deeper parts of yourself that I can’t do as well in a casual conversation.
It sounds both similar yet different from journaling when you really think about it. When I’m writing in my journal, that is a space to express myself and only myself. When I’m writing a story, it’s a mix of all the elements addressed at the top of this post. Where the unspoken parts come in, at least for me, is from the material captured in my journals, where I then seamlessly weave into whatever story I am telling, giving it that bit of truth that is maybe is not detected for reasons obvious at this point. In the latter, I’m still expressing myself, but through a filter.
It’s something that’s been on my mind as of late with the newer stories I’ve been writing and the ones that have been spurring almost out of nowhere. As someone who doesn’t always feel understood in everyday life, writing fiction is ultimately a way for me to be heard, but only by those who get it.
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Lola By The Bay 