My life is pretty boring. But, my main character is based a bit on me. The events in the story never happened to me, but she reacts how I might.
And, of course, we neeeever embellish. I must be the lucky one. I have enough calamity in my life to condition me for anything that might go wrong. The results? I design and invent things that not only work, but are somewhat overbuilt enough to withstand what the planet and its peoples can throw at it. Now I just have to deal with what monkeys can throw at it...
Oh god I couldn't do that! I'm supposed to be the "elf and safety" officer at work. I couldn't use my own reactions. Would come down to writing reports about everything.
When I was half-finished my sci-fi contest entry, I realized that the protagonist had most of my manager's personality traits. I wonder why I chose my superior, of all people @Renee J Never, ever true. Everyone has a story to tell.
I'm an INFJ personality. I start boarding up my windows from the inside if I see the postal courier getting too close... (imagining all these arms pushing through the openings with Christmas cards in hand... ) Just kidding. It's the other people boarding shut their windows and doors when they see me coming because I probably have another one of my weird jokes to tell them that involve subjects like brain chemistry... (imagine Dexter coming to visit with a scalpel, probe, cranium frame and bone saw...)
A lot of me is going into my book. It's what I want to write. In addition, more than once I've been grateful I'd traveled so much because something I saw first hand gave me more than just searching images has given me. I know what the forest feels like, smells like, sounds like. I know what the forest feels like when there's a heat wave, and how it feels in the cold rain. I've put my hand over a steam vent in a recent lava flow and had to pull it away because the heat was so intense. I've walked over un-eroded lava flows and I know what the terrain is like. I know how your body feels when you been riding waves all day and now you are lying still and you still feel the movement. I've seen a meteor storm, Meteor Crater, and the Grand Canyon. I know how it feels when you've been traveling alone and a wave of loneliness overtakes you even though people are always around. They aren't people you know or who know you, even if you've been with them a couple weeks. I know how far away it feels when you travel to Australia but your home is in the US. And the Moon looks upside down when you cross the equator. There's so much more I could describe. These things are all coming back to me as I write the scenes in my book and I love it.
Seems not to be totally verboten (bantering). This thread was dormant for a long time now it's hopping. We're here to help and entertain each other, aren't we? If YOU want to be a narcissist magnet, try moving to Costa Rica and hanging out in the gringo bars. If you don't meet one in 15 minutes, the bar is probably closed and you got in by accident.
Maybe they were cleaning and left the door open. Or it's past closing and the doorman is taking a piss. Or someone teleported you there. Plenty of options for an imaginative fiction writer.
Subconsciously, you admire this person. We all find role models that seem to apply to us everything our biological parents couldn't. It's called "finding ourselves." @GingerCoffee Jules Verne was a sickly man who wrote his works based around the experiences seen through other's eyes. Someone has to actually experience things for someone who can't to be able to save through their telling the story.
Actually, there was one time a drunk lost his balance and fell through the big front window of a bar downtown. But he was inside and fell out. It could have happened the other way, though. They never replaced the window, just left it open air and it was quite nice. Of course, they had a large metal shutter to close it off at night. But even places with windows do that here. Bars and metal shutters on every window, virtually.
The report was made by another employee who fetched the manager when I was off shift for the day, not on company property, and out of uniform (refer to the not happy thread last page for the story.) I'm not admitting to/pleading for anything I shouldn't have to based off heresay.
In my current project, my narrator, Kevin, is recounting what happened to him as a 13-year-old, when he suddenly moved to a new neighborhood very different from his old as a result of his parents splitting up. His mother is an Irish immigrant, and she has left his father after his father's gambling addiction has left them in financial ruin. I am an Irish-American, although it was my paternal grandmother, not my mother, who was the most recent immigrant. When I was 13, we moved to a new neighborhood, very different from the old, so the sense of isolation is very familiar to me. And, when I was 13, I found out my father was addicted to alcohol, and though he left us for a time when I was 15, it was not permanent. He never conquered his addition. So, yes, I have relied on my past events, but Kevin is not me.
The names are changed to protect the guilty and innocent alike... When I write a first person narrative, I find it can be so much fun to build the character and the narrative after me. I'm the one in the neighborhood who might be found running down the street yelling "Eureka!" with his white lab coat in flames. Every neighborhood has one of those... don't they? Here, in Indiana, we hear on the news quite frequently of someone, even a schoolbus driver, that has crashed into a house or some establishment. Most of the time nobody gets hurt. Once some folks in a restaurant, where a drunk driver crashed through the window adjoining their booth, were not so lucky. @Alesia I'll go look at the unhappy thread. Sometimes we all need the ones who do what they an to protect us against our worst enemy; ourselves. At cyber-arm's length, it's more difficult than dealing with someone in our real-world home who may be suffering from Alzheimer's or dementia, or even worse, schizophrenia and/or bipolarism. Sometimes writing and spilling our guts to a cyber-family is all we can trust.
Haven't read through the thread, but saw the title. Hope this doesn't seem like a self-promotion, because I definitely do not think the article is of any merit, but it is something I wrote, which plays around with an idea that I think more or less answers your question. Here is a link to the article, which can also be found under the 'Articles' page: https://www.writingforums.org/articles/writing-outside-of-yourself-thoughts-on-speculative-empathy/
