Only You Can Tell Your Stories — Writing from Your Experiences

I was recently asked — what do you bring to your story that no one else can? It got me thinking. Where do my ideas for characters come from? They come from my experiences. One new character in this sequel to The Invisibles is based on my unusual family of origin.

When we were in our teens, my brother and I were joined in our family home by two troubled teenagers. They were high school riends of my brothers from San Pedro, which we had recently left. My mom, who has a generous heart, arranged to adopt Eddie and John when we moved to Berkeley. Mom bought a huge house, I believe it had about six bedrooms, including a large attic bedroom. Mom invited the boys to share this big attic room with my brother, and they became part of a big, collected family that included people renting some of the bedrooms.

The three boys were definitely trouble, but somehow being with us helped the two. It was the sixties and seventies, and everyone at Berkeley High was a hippie. Many were dabbling in psychedelics and playing rock and roll, including my brother and his friends. They were a happy threesome, and we all agreed not to look in their room, which at one point featured black-painted walls and strobe lights. An iguana in a cage. And lots of music. Who knows what else. It was a time, and we often ate dinner around our huge table with ten or twelve people who either lived there or were visiting someone who did.

My character, Daniel Perdue, is based on the wild threesome of David, Eddie, and John. It’s also based on my brother’s eventual journey through addiction to recovery and then going into the field of helping others to recover from addictions. My character isn’t any one of these young guys, but takes qualities from each of them, including a tendency to break the law and fall in with people who lead them astray. He also has a love of music and talent singing and writing songs. Daniel isn’t addicted, but he has to recover from a childhood of abuse and poverty. It isn’t going to be an easy path, as it wasn’t for my brothers.

Writing a character based on my experiences in that big house in Berkeley gave me a lot I felt nostalgia, had ideas, and ultimately had a feeling of resolution. Creating a character from imagination means, for me, drawing on my own experiences and the people I’ve know. I just have to think about and find what interests me in each one. And every person is interesting. That’s the essence of good fiction.

The more I write characters, the more awe I feel at the universes we each embody. Every person, and every character based on a person, is a cosmos of inheritance, childhood, struggle, and creativity. I don’t believe there’s a person alive who isn’t creative at making of what they’re given a unique life.

So when people ask me how I find ideas for characters and the stories that arise from them, I say, “Look around and look deeper. Everyone around you is a walking marvel of originality.”