As your story develops, an amazing moment happens when the story you thought you were writing cracks open to reveal unexpected truths. Although you don’t need to do outside research about your experiences, you do need to dig deep inside yourself and be honest about what you find. You are the Expert of You. You have all the information you need within you. Whether you want to write about your life experiences as memoir, or within a fiction, here are a few things I’ve learned over the years about this process that can be exhilarating and devastating, and sometimes both at the same time. And as I wrote about my widowhood, I also started to explore and write about other things from the trove of all my life experiences. Yet, as the representations of “me” in the news fell short and inaccurate, I felt compelled to share what I knew by writing first person accounts of my life in essays and in my graphic novel memoir American Widow (with art by Sungyoon Choi, Villard, 2008).Īlthough I wrote specifically about how I experienced this very public traumatic event, I often also wrote about the small personal aspects within it. Why was I unable to explore and exploit it? Was I embarrassed by it? Did I think of my own experiences as somehow unworthy or invalid?Īfter my husband died in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, I became a “9/11 Widow.” As the media relentlessly pursued the 9/11 victims’ families for stories about their loved ones and their experiences, I refused all interviews because I didn’t want my experiences reduced to a mere quote or two in someone else’s news story. Thinking back, I had a trove of material available to me. Despite having read many wonderful authors who used threads, scraps, or the entire cloth of their own lives in their fictional works, I never considered mining my own life stories during that semester. I concocted characters and experiences that were hollow and uninteresting. As a college sophomore, I took a one-on-one fiction tutorial.

Novel trove