Caren Johnson Literary Agency

By Faye Hughes

Write What You Know. It’s probably one of the most common pieces of advice a new writer will receive. I think I was 13 when someone first shared that bit of wisdom with me, and I did what a typical 13 year old does with advice she doesn’t want to hear: I ignored it. That means, instead of writing about a socially awkward 13-year-old girl who lived in a small town in Mississippi with a beautiful, though slightly crazy aunt who took her indoor house cat for walks in their bougainvillea-scented backyard while wearing a flowing, hot pink negligee, high heels and a tiara she’d gotten when she won a beauty pageant in college some 15 years earlier, I wrote about an 18-year-old college student in Montana, the wild mustang she’d adopted one summer and the battle between environmentalists and ranchers. If you’re thinking that I’d never been to Montana, knew nothing about mustangs, ranches and environmentalists or how an 18-year-old woman felt, you’d be right. Still, that’s the story I chose to write.

Pretty stupid, huh?

Yeah, well, the book was awful. But when I was 13, I wrote about Montana and wild mustangs because I felt my real life in Mississippi was boring and uninspiring. As funny as that is now, I’m probably not the only one who thinks their everyday world is boring. Lucky for me, I finally figured out that there’s much to be said for writing about what you know. And lucky for you, I like to share.

Here are some suggestions on how you can use the ordinary to create the extraordinary in your writing:

Use Your Day Job in a Novel. Is your job boring? Dead-end? A total waste of your creativity for eight hours every day? Not a problem. Whatever your job, you can probably find a way to use it in a novel. Make your workplace funny, make it scary, even make it sexy. Let your imagination fly. Sure, you’ll have to change the names to protect the guilty, but all of those great office gossip stories can be mined for literary gold!

Use Your Family and Friends as Inspiration for Characters. Okay, you can’t identify them by name, nor can you describe them in such a way that they’ll recognize themselves and cry foul because of the unflattering spin you’ve put on them. (The last thing you’ll want to do is give people ammunition for lawsuits or ill feelings.) But you can take the peculiar traits of those nearest and dearest and apply them to a character in your novel.

Which Day-In-The-Life Anecdote Gets You The Most Applause? When you’re regaling your friends about your latest run-in with a soccer mom at the local mall over a parking space, do you find that strangers at the next table over are eavesdrop on your conversations at Happy Hour? Sure, it may just be your delivery, but if the story isn’t amusing/intriguing/horrifying, they wouldn’t continue to listen. Use one of your best anecdotes as an opening scene in your novel, and see where it takes you.

Write About Life In Your Hometown. Large city or small village, every place has something unique and different about it. And if you can’t think of a single reason why your hometown would inspire a reader to turn the pages of a book set there, then write about that. Have your protagonist acknowledge that he/she lives in the Most Boring Town in America. Then have him or her stumble across a dead body in the frozen food aisle of the local Wal-Mart. Your knowledge of the streets, restaurants and landmarks of your hometown can save you a bundle in researching a new location!

Find the Emotional Connection. Good fiction evokes a strong emotional response in a reader—fear, lust, laughter. Take a memory that evokes the same emotional response that you need to have your character experience, remove its emotional soul and transplant it into the scene. For example, you may have never been stalked by a killer, but by transferring the memory of how you felt when your older brother scared the pants off you one night when your parents were away can put you in touch with the core emotion. Use it.

I hope these suggestions have given you some ideas of how you can take the ordinary and turn it into something extraordinary within the pages of your book. If you’re still not convinced that your life has what it takes to make for exciting fiction, then try this: Make a list of the top 10 reasons why you think your life sucks as literary inspiration. Then take that list and come up with 10 ways to use each of those reasons as a plot trigger in your WIP. Who knows? You might just find something extraordinary.

Happy Writing!

Faye Hughes

THE EVERYTHING GUIDE TO WRITING A ROMANCE NOVEL (Adams Media, 09/08)