So I’ve had a few people ask me: Where did this book come from? And my brain automatically leaps to the most inappropriate answer: Well, when a writer and a laptop love each other very much… *cough* Anyway… the actual answer is rather long. Mostly because this story has multiple incarnations and each regeneration is story of its own. So this is just… the first beginning.
Some stories I really can’t point to a specific place where the idea was born, but in Path’s case there are two distinct starting points and then a chain of building momentum that I did not see coming and at a couple of points tried fairly strenuously to stop.
The first thing that happened was I had this dream. Which we will not go into because it makes even less sense when I try to tell it to people than it does in my head and has very little, if anything, to do with the final story. But suffice it to say it included a guy falling out a window, a thoroughly ridiculous horse race, the sun coming up twice once morning and a scene that for a long time was the prologue to the first book (and now will appear in book three for various perfectly sensible reasons, like I’m not a big fan of prologues).
The next morning (or possibly that night) I wrote the dream-story down, wondered a little about myself, and then forgot about it.
An indeterminate amount of time later I was at a thing. A thing that may or may not have been a writer’s festival. It was a thing with panels and workshops and speeches and so on, in any case. And there was an author there that I wanted to hear speak but on that day the only thing he was scheduled to do was give a workshop on writing about people that you know.
Which is something I hate to do. It feels kind of dirty and gives me the squicks. Maybe because I am realist enough to know that I can’t really fathom the depths of another person’s mind, I am not privy to all the tiny details that make them tick. It feels wrong to write an incomplete or inaccurate version of someone and I like to think I’m not arrogant enough to believe I could create a truly accurate representation of another living person. (Of course I am, and just framing it like that makes it sound like a challenge I want to take up… but no.) I’d also rather my friends and relatives aren’t given reason to hit me.
But on this day I really wanted to hear this author talk so I thought, what the hell. And I went. Just because I listened to him talk about it didn’t mean I had to do it.
The author in question was interesting and entertaining, and then, because it was, after all, a workshop, he asked us to write something. He told us to take someone we knew, who had a vivid and distinct character, and put them in a location and context that was as far as possible from their ordinary life, and see what happened.
So I chose my friend Kitty. I made her a boy, a dragon slayer, and I gave her a dragon. And I stepped back to see what would happen. And she promptly hit on the dragon. Cause, you know, that just seemed more likely.
platform thing 
Claire
15/11/2011
So I woke up this morning (yes, I finally collapsed into what may have seemed from the outside like a deep slumber) with the thought that I would write my jumbled mess of a life in the third person. Someone recently suggested that I channel my current emotional turmoil into the written word and I’m not having much success diarising the thing. If I do that though, I will, by necessity, need to write about other, real people. I am seriously struggling with how to do that respectfully and to not have people I love end up hating me.
Does this mean I don’t do it? It was sounding so good in my head in the shower.
Oh and I can totally see Kitty hitting on a dragon.
Kandace Mavrick
15/11/2011
Oh and I can totally see Kitty hitting on a dragon.
Everyone agrees, apparently. To be fair, though, that story was written about 12 years ago. These days I think it’s more likely she’d cut the dragon with her fancy knives and then grind it under her cute Victorian-style booted heels.
But that’s the exact problem with writing about people you know. Fundamentally, you’re writing a caricature of who they really are. Taking the most recognisable or key personality traits and writing those as if they were the be all and end all of the person themselves. Which is never true. And why people get so annoyed about it when it’s done.
I think there’s nothing really wrong about writing about real people as long as you acknowledge that. Like, really acknowledge that as soon as you set them down on paper they are not those people. They can’t be. I would tend not to do it unless I had permission from the people in question and even then… people are often fine with the idea in concept but then they don’t like the result, because they don’t like the way you see them, or the way you’ve represented them. Which is… yeah, warning lights everywhere. Which is why I don’t do it. I don’t think I can do it properly, and I don’t have any reason to. I have no urge whatsoever to write even semi-autobiographical fiction.
In your case… diaries or journals can be tricky when you’re working through something because the highly personal nature of starting sentences with the word ‘I’ can throw you. So I understand that there can be value in conceptualising the whole thing as fiction. Generally speaking, I think if you want to do that what you do, to start with at least, is keep it to yourself and not show anyone. If you think that you’re just writing for you then you’re not worried about what other people will think, or representing yourself in the best light, and the process will be more effective. And if, when you’re done, you do want to show it to other people, share it with them or whatever. Well then, that’s your moment to ask permission of the people you’ve written about. And if they’re people you care about — friends, loved ones — I really do mean ask. And be prepared to either rewrite or bottom drawer the whole thing if they say they’re not comfortable with it. If you decide after that to put it out there anyway… well, that’s a choice too, but that’s the moment you have to worry about them hating you (possibly justifiably?), not before.