Writing gives you the ability to document who you are at the exact moment you write it. Doesn’t matter if you’re writing a tell-all memoir or a business book. It still allows you as the author to share a story in your voice and worldview.
So embrace that and put it into the pages.
For a minute forget about publishing and selling books and all that (don’t tell my publisher I said that). Just think about the book you’re writing. Or the book you want to write.
Every story I’ve told has been a snapshot in time. Even if the story has been as fictional as I could possibly make it, it’s impossible not to put myself in the pages. Some authors don’t like to admit this, but every author does this. I’m not just talking about putting themselves in the book. I’m talking about putting their struggles and their interests and their passions and their faults into the pages. Why even bother to write if you don’t?
A story told by a sixteen-year old is far different than the same story told by a twenty-six year old. Or a thirty-six year old. You can keep going.
Every book is a chance to document who you are at that moment.
Are you sixty-three and thinking about retirement and wanting to share some of the stories you’ve seen? Are you twenty-one in college wondering what you’re going to do once you graduate? Are you approaching forty and still feeling too young and also feeling far too old?
Whatever you write will reflect this. There will be echoes of it in the prose. Hints, doses, droplets. It doesn’t have to be exactly about you.
I’m learning this. I don’t have to write about a (put my age here)-year old guy dealing with (whatever I’m dealing with). My current novel has a female protagonist who is ten years younger than me. She’s from Texas (which I’m not). She’s been involved in things I’ve never been involved with.
Yet, I have a feeling that if I’m given the ability to look at this novel I’m working on ten or twenty or thirty years from now, I’ll remember why I wrote it. And those reasons will be more than simply to write a really great story. It will be a snapshot of the man I am, living in 2009 dealing with the life around me. Putting in things I appreciate and understand. Putting in fears I carry around with me. Putting in a part of myself, yet not too much of myself (which I sometimes can do).
My tip is to celebrate who you are. Doesn’t mean that some publisher will celebrate with you (as I am painfully aware). But they might. And someday, you might look back at a little love story told in such a sweet and naive fashion and wonder if that really was you who wrote it. I do this all the time. And not just with the published stuff, either, but will all my writing. I look back and I remember.
Hopefully you do the same.
I agree that a lot of “you” ends up being in your work. I basically write poetry and some flash fiction, but I can’t help to project some of my feelings into my writing. Regardless of whether it’s about me or not, writing is personal and it’s hard to sometimes separate your views on a given subject from your characters.