: Re: Basing fiction on personal life I had in mind to use threads from my own life as a foundation for work, keeping much of the incidents, traits and all, but building upon them in a potentially

@Sarah872

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The pitfall is that somebody who knows you and is aware of things about you may get a deeper insight about you, which can be good or bad. If done right, on the other hand, it will only make the text richer.

A book I just wrote has a lot of real life experiences that happened to me, friends or acquaintances. In fact, it's a must for me to use interesting characters and events that I live or get to know from somebody else because I really believe it makes the text much more believable... or not, because some of the real life stories I use are hard to believe. All in all, I think the final result was just great, at least from my paternal writer point of view.

I guess the key point here is to draw a line. The book can't be about you, assuming it's fiction, and it's easy to lose track. I wouldn't like at all to hear somebody saying my book was autobiographical, because it is not. It just has some of my experiences. The Cohen Brothers are famous for doing exactly the same thing in their movies.

My advice is, use all the good and bad experiences you think might fit and make them fit your characters, not you.

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