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Black History Month Author Roundtable
4.
AOTW: Is any of your work based on real-life experiences?
Ray Shannon: No.
Marcus Major: I'm finding that with each passing book, less and less is based on personal experiences.
Nalo Hopkinson: No, not really. And yes, in a way. Life doesn't make good fiction. I once had Karen Joy Fowler as a writing instructor, and she said, "real people don't act at all in a plotworthy manner." It's true. When you write fiction, you shape events in order to create something sculpted. Life isn't like that. It's messy and it goes off on tangents, and it drops story threads. It's like the difference between clay you can collect on the riverbank and the shaped, glazed, fired vase you might make from that clay once you've picked all the stones and twigs out of it and kneaded all the air out of it. Woman writer Frances Trollope said, "Of course I draw from life --- but I always pulp my acquaintance before serving them up. You would never recognize a pig in a sausage." I might use an experience I had, or that someone told me about, but I'll mix it and change it until it's unrecognizable, to fit the story I'm telling. Sometimes when people learn that I'm a published writer, they'll say, "Oh, you should write about my life. It'd make a good story." It probably would, but I don't write life. I write fiction. Besides, real people sue, especially in America. The thing is, though, that while fiction may not be real, it should be true. In order for us to relate to it as readers, a story should be telling us something that we can sense is part of life, or what life could be, or what we might be able to make of it.
Harriette Cole: All of my work is based on real-life experiences. Choosing Truth has many very revealing stories about my own life and others because I wanted to be sure that people could see how deeply one has to dig to find Truth in their own lives. By showing what the work looks like as well as the range of experiences that "successful" people have as they reach and sustain success, I believe that I will be able to inspire people to accept the responsibility to improve their lives.
Nikki Giovanni: Only very very little. Most lives, mine included, just aren't that interesting and the writer should do all (s)he can to not over tap her own life.
Diane McKinney-Whetstone: My settings begin with real places, real neighborhoods, but after that the imaginative process takes over and what's real and what's made up blur in often inextricable ways.
Olympia Vernon: I would like to know what work does not rise out of what we, as writers, could not do or say at one point in our lives. Characters have their own lives. If my life shows up, they slam the door. If they choose to keep it open, it is only because they have kept me up on night with their rambling.
Stephanie Perry Moore: Some!
Jenoyne Adams: A lot of my work is based on real-life emotional experience. I try to infuse every physical situation with emotions I have felt --- meaning, though I have never been divorced after a thirty-five year marriage, I do know what betrayal, loss and regret feel like and this is where I write from.
Victor LaValle: All my work is, in some way, based on real life. It all gets filtered through my brain and when it comes out the other side, it looks sort of like my experience, but slightly warped.
Stanice Anderson: Yes, both books are based on my life experiences. My first book, 12-Step Programs: A Resource Guide for Helping Professionals published in 1999 by Learning Publications, is based on my active participation in 12-Step recovery programs. It includes an insider's view, including assessment questions, how to set up groups, how to get the most out of the programs, and includes information on more than 100 programs.
My new book, I Say a Prayer for Me: One Woman's Life of Faith and Triumph, published by Walk Worthy Press/Warner Books in November 2002 contains over 40 true life-stories, complete with the people who have populated my life before and during this 17-year journey to spiritual, emotional health and wholeness. I recant the miracles, relationship with my son, jobs, tragedies, successes, healings, resurrected dreams, and always the hope. I segue each story into the readers lives, followed by a prayer and a verse or two from God's Word, the Holy Bible. The not-too-often heard verses that make you say, "Wow, how comforting? How personal? I didn't know that was in the Bible."
Benilde Little: My work deals a lot with social classes. We pretend that there is no class structure in this country and that's something I've dealt with personally and take on in my work.
Y. Blak Moore: I have to plead the fifth on that one, but as we all know life imitates art or is it the other way around?
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