In today’s installment of “Ask Amy,” the advice columnist hears from a writer whose novel was a fictionalized version of her own life and now is dealing with fallout from friends who didn’t like the way they were portrayed.
Maybe someone took that “write what you know” advice too literally?
I wouldn’t want to write a fictionalized version of my life. Boring. And I mean to me, let alone you.
To the adage “write what you know,” I’d add “write what you see and write what you hear and write what you read.”
One of the best sources of inspiration is the newspaper. And I’m not just talking about the crime report, although I’ve always found good fodder there — especially when I lived in Florida.
(I’m still noodling on a brief in The Washington Post about two sisters in their 80s who fended off a burglar with the tools they had at hand. Must work that concept into a novel somehow…)
For a display of human nature in all its glory and depravity, jubilation and despair, workaday heroism and casual cowardice, you can’t beat the pages of your daily newspaper.
I especially like the advice columns, even though I catch grief from my husband for reading them. That’s the one place where people explain their problems in their own words, and you see just how often we get into trouble by focusing on the wrong issue.
Several characters in Identity fall into this trap — Brian, certainly. In fact, Brian’s entire family might be built on the concept of focusing on the wrong issues.
Oh, and that letter writer to Ask Amy? She thought her problem was that one of her aggrieved friends had written a bad online review of her book.