CONNECTING OUR PAST AND FUTURE:
HOW WRITERS KEEP EXPERIENCES ALIVE
By Guest Blogger Thelma T. Reyna, Ph.D.
For better or worse, our experiences created us, inside and out, and continue to influence who we are. For writers, personal experiences oftentimes end up on the pages of our books, poems, stories, screenplays, and essays.
Even when our creations are “fictionalized,” the heart of our tales springs from our childhoods, our marriages and friendships, people we know at work, and from our everyday surroundings. It has been a long-accepted maxim that writers usually write what they know best, and what we know best is oftentimes what we have experienced directly.
Can life events be relived for decades and centuries into the future? In essence, can time stand still? By interjecting their writings with personal experiences, authors do indeed capture these events in time, to be relived by generations of readers, thus weaving past and future with the power of the written word.
An Element of Autobiography Prevails
In addition to memoirs, fictional writings are replete with an element of autobiography.
Consider the case of current Latina bestselling author, Caridad Piñeiro, acclaimed writer of 24 romance books. Her huge success with her new “paranormal romance” SIN series can be traced to her deep love of science and extensive training in it.
In her newest book, Sins of the Flesh, the novel’s hero, Caterina Shaw, is afflicted with a strange medical condition that causes her skin to blend into the background, like a chameleon’s. Suffering from a terminal illness, Caterina was used, without her consent, as a guinea pig in a demented doctor’s laboratory. In creating this riveting tale of medical experimentation (and romance!), Caridad used her direct experiences with science and laboratories to craft the plot of this book.
Caridad recently communicated to me: “I was a science geek, earning a B.S. degree magna cum laude from Villanova University....My love of science led to this new series. There have been hints of it in other books, but this time it was more overt.”
She adds: “I think that every experience in life adds something to what we do. In this case, it helped create a new concept for [my] novels.”
Such is the transferable, ubiquitous power of personal experience!
Another Latina Author’s Experiences
Sandra Cisneros, one of our premier contemporary authors, states on her website that she writes “...what happened to me that I can’t forget, but also what happened to others I love, or what strangers have told me happened to them....” She includes vicarious experience as inspiration for her fiction.
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Ultimately, she takes all experience and “cuts and pastes it together to make a story....” Her last novel, Caramelo, is, according to Booklist, “a sweeping, fictionalized history” of the author’s Mexican-American clan. Indeed, Sandra’s research into her roots entailed trips to Mexico for approximately a decade.
Speaking from Experience...
Many of my own stories are also triggered by personal experience, though I usually expand a small event into a full one with characters, settings, and events that I did not in fact experience.
One of the stories in my new book, for example, describes a woman on a neighborhood walk who finds a small, lovely jewelry box by a trash bin and takes it home. The first two pages of this story, “Little Box,” are an exact description of my discovery of such a box in Chicago. However, everything that happens from that page forward is total fiction. (The little box, by the way, sits on my bookshelf now as I write this blog.)
Conversely, another of my stories, “White Van,” describes my own neighborhood in Pasadena and closely depicts a neighbor I had long ago. Though the narrator of the story is fictionalized, the situation in the story is almost all based on reality.
My story “Juana Macho” was inspired by someone I knew in my native Texas. “Fooled” was inspired by my own mother’s critical illness and the measures my family members took to protect her from tragic news. “Marry Me” was triggered by the fact that one of my younger brothers was the object of affection of an elderly woman who proposed to him!
Of course, although fiction writers may use their experiences as a springboard to their tales, imagination takes over and renders an actuality into a new creation.
The Bond Between Life and Literature
Perhaps this pervasive tapping of experience by authors—whether just as inspiration for a plot or character, or for an entire story or poem, or any amalgamation in between—is a testament to the closeness of literature and life.
We’ve heard it said that good literature mirrors life. Literature captures the nuances of experience and reflects these back to us to enlighten us about people, about love and struggle, about all the vicissitudes that life presents us.
As Fred White, in his book The Daily Writer (2008), states: “Our imagination allows us to extrapolate from stories we’ve read...and our own familiarity....”
Writers past and present extract the heart of the matter from an experience that moved them somehow, then offer that experience to their readers in a new, gussied-up form, with embellishments that give the original experience a uniqueness birthed by the author.
The Stories in All of Us
Ultimately, we all have stories inside us that are worthy of a book, a chapter in a book, or a poem and more. Unavoidably, we often reflect on experiences we’ve had, dissecting them alone or with others to find meaning in them and in life in general. This dissecting, this analysis is similar to what authors do, as they take snippets of experiences and, as Cisneros says, weave them together to make a story.
Luckily for broader society, the weaving that writers do enriches all of us and helps enlighten our journeys in this world.
[For any of the books listed in this post click on the links to be taken to amazon for purchase or reviews.] |
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