This is something I run into all the time as I'm writing: the times when things I personally have done end up in my stories. Bits of my relationships, places I've visited, activities I've engaged in. Stuff like that really helps with writing, I feel. In fact sometimes it really shows when an author is writing about something they have no real world experience with. (This is most obvious, I find, in clopfics. Yeah, it doesn't work like that, folks. Or like that either.)

Recently I've put the place I currently live, some wine tastings I've been to, and a bunch of old memories about dating into things I'm writing.

What about you?

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Honestly, I think it's my omnivorous reading habits that show up the most in my stories. I haven't done.. actually, I guess I have. I've done a lot. I suppose that it doesn't seem like a lot, looking back, until I try to think about other people who have been to the places I've been or experienced the things that I have. Vague, I know, but intentionally so. My list of experiences is very different from anyone else's, therefore I have done a lot that others have not done.

Including some that I doubt many in the world have even considered, let alone done... Albeit not intentionally, and nothing criminal. Let's just say that I followed my emotions around as a youngling and leave it at that. Though they do sometimes still take hold.

My experience provides context for me and my reading habits. I have a very omnivorous reading diet. I've read everything from list books, historical accounts, thrillers, historical fiction, technical manuals (for fun), astronomy books, anthropology theses, biology texts, mysteries, cheesy romance, theoretical physics books, biographies, short story collections, epic tales, fantasy, science fiction, myth (The Illiad and Odyssey, some of the Poetic Edda,)... and more. I'm also a fan of traipsing around TVTropes, Wikipedia and fan wikis.

I don't think I could have fit all that in into a shorter life and still had it come out making any kind of sense. I'm not so sure it doesn't come out senseless anyway.

I honestly don't think a lot that I've personally done has shown up in my stories. I already know what my life is... I want to see what someone else's life might be like. My experiences do color the things that I do write about, however, and how I might perceive those things were I in my characters' horseshoes.

Overall, I would say that my reading has influenced and guided my writing far more than anything that I have gone out and done. The things that I do lend insight into the worlds I create, however and, I hope, add some depth.

I suppose I write to be an escapist. I have no idea if that's weird or not.

I'm not really sure if this was the kind of thing you were looking for. I tend to ramble a lot and what comes out through the keyboard doesn't always end up making sense... or stay on topic.

Ramble all you like!

I suppose I write to be an escapist. I have no idea if that's weird or not.

Well, I'm weird as heck, so I can't say if it's weird or not, but escapism is a big part of it for me too. My life experiences don't necessarily shape the plot of my writing, I like grand adventures that have nothing to do with anything I've ever done, for example. But the little details get filled in a lot by stuff I've really done.

And every now and then some bit of my life does end up being rather the point of the story (see Longer Than Diamonds, in which Rarity pretty much is me, just with more fashion sense and less plush making.)

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I write a lot of romance, and I find that I'm far more interested in reading and writing about the parts of a relationship after the initial "getting together." I think that has to do with the fact I've been with my husband for almost 12 years now, between dating and marriage, so it's been a while since that first date. But there's still so much ground to cover at various points in a relationship!

Aside from the ongoing relationship aspect of it, I did write The Homesteading largely about my own views of my house. I have a 1920s farmhouse that will never be finished the renovation process. And if it ever is, something else will go wrong with it. So while the story is about supernatural happenings, the emotions in it are totally based on owning a home you love and wanting to burn it to the ground at the same time, but loving it more in the end.

In general, I find that being older than a lot of folks gives me... not so much experiences to write about, but different kinds of stories to tell.

(Also, don't even get me started on clop. The combination of not being a virgin and being female makes some of it especially cringe worthy.)

3220247 Yeah, I agree. While there is a reason that the coming of age story and the falling in love story are staples of writing, the things that come after are often just as interesting, and much less frequently covered. I haven't delved into it so much with my ponyfic, but my major original fantasy opus centers around an already married couple. Which funnily enough I started writing well before I got married myself. But I was tired of telling the same kinds of stories, I wanted to do something different. (And I married late...)

I think the biggest thing that comes through for me is that the conflicts in my stories are a lot more subtle these days. There's only so many times you can work with the end of the world, and as you get older you start to realize that you don't have to in order to find something that really matters to the characters and motivates them.

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My fics sometimes contain shout-outs to science, especially biotechnology. Also, many characters I write (especially in my early fics) are doctors...

A propos doctors: in A Kingdom Divided there's a scene where Cloudchaser uses Glasgow Coma Scale to evaluate how drunk Rainbow Dash is. Similar scene actually happened in real life: my friend passed out during a party. As there were at least 10 biotechnology and medicine students there, we checked how conscious he was and how to sober him up (advice: a drunk person is dehydrated and has low glucose level, so treat them with water and something sweet. And something containing vitamin C).

Other things: one of my hobbies are planes. I've read many books about WWI and WWII planes and I know not only technical details but also tactics, armament etc. That's why I like to write about pegasi, and that was partially why I started to write A Kingdom Divided (well, if someone asks, I'll tell that I basically wanted to write an anti-war story mixed with, pardon my French, coming of age story, but in fact I just like writing aerial combat...).

I also like to read and watch various things and this is the main source of references in my fics. They're all over the map. Motives from Shakespeare, the Bible, old science-fiction, HP Lovecraft shout-outs, fics based on Nick Cave's songs and so on...

I've had the opposite experience in writing. I never put anything of mine in the stories intentionally. However, as the stories grew bigger, I saw a common theme forming within them. I've found out that my writing acts as a mirror. I can see the things about me now, that I didn't see before. I've never pictured myself as a dark person, yet my stories tell of a gloomy tale.

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I'm sure my life experiences affect my writing in a very general, subtle way I usually don't think about. The being said, I very likely would not have written Eleven Months if it wasn't for the fact I have a daughter and witnessed the birth.

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I suppose I write to be an escapist. I have no idea if that's weird or not.

I tend to find that writing isn't really 'escapism'; for me it's more like 'day release from the mental institution'.

If you're worried about escapism, you have to ask yourself three questions.

1) Where are you escaping to
2) What are you escaping from
3) Which kind of person is opposed to escape?

The answer to the last one can be very interesting.

Anyway... I don't know if it's life-experience as such, but I have noticed several themes developing in my writing recently, particularly on the subject of regret and lost dreams. It makes me wonder what exactly is going on in my head.

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3) Which kind of person is opposed to escape?

Ha. I've asked my mother more or less that question countless times. Every time the subject of books comes up, and she starts getting annoyed that I don't want to read her "true story" bookclub specials.

Oh totally! I drew upon my vast, varied experience with seven-participant lesbian orgies and ...

... What?

... Okay, fine. The only thing that came from life experience was the snarky tone of the thing! Happy now!?

Well, for me, I try and draw elements of what I like to see in the stories I've read and try and re-create them as best I can in my works. By that I mean, if I see a certain author has a knack for worldbuilding, banter, dialogue, etc, I want to follow their example and make things work.

For me, the best writing is about creating a world that the characters not only live in, but breathes on its own. Like, say Pratchett's Discworld. There's something holding everything up-in this case, four elephants- but even so, simple things are accounted for, like who gets their food, and from where.

I guess, for me, for a fantasy world to make sense, as part of my writing I like to go into the reasoning behind it. Anyone who's familiar with Stackpole would feel the same way.

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Thinking about this a little more, aside from the rather subtle stuff, I fine my age kinda makes me feel I can write characters who are in their late 20s and feel pretty good about their dialogue and how they act, etc... This also extends to pop culture references they might make since it's pretty reasonable they'd be rather familiar with the same things I am.

I really feel like you can't even begin to consider something good writing unless it's informed in some way by the writer's experience. I mean it's cliche as hell at this point, but "Write what you know" is probably the truest adage in the medium. And by experience I'm not just talking about things you've done or seen, I'm talking about the emotional experience you gained from seeing/doing/reading those things. Emotion is what grounds even fantastically ignorant nonsense like talking friendship ponies in a relatable, human way. You won't make me care about something unless you can make me feel for it, and you can't make me feel anything you can't describe to me yourself. The more experience you have with something, the easier it is to know what's important in it, and once you know that, you can cut away the fat and gristle that makes poor writing difficult to sit through.

As for my own stories. The story I just finished a few days ago, Playing the Scales, had the entire setting based on my own tangible experience. When I was a kid every summer we went to the Santa Cruz Boardwalk in CA, and not far from there was Half Moon Bay, a much smaller town with a really nice resort and golf course. There's a scene with Octavia and Spike where they visit a breakwater lagoon and that scene is almost completely based on a place my dad drove us to once when every nice beach was full up with tourists. We were driving literally the entire day up and down the coast, and he found this beat up old sign that said "BEACH ->" so he turned onto a dirt road and we ended up at this place that was so perfectly deserted that it really stuck with me, even just about two decades later. We went back the next weekend but couldn't find that sign again. Sign either blew down, or it was a haunted beach.

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Difficult question for me, since, to be honest, my life experiences would not look like anything much if written out. I'm a huge introvert, I haven't travelled much, or gotten to know many fascinating people, or worked many strange jobs. What I have done is read voraciously, and studied literature from lots of different historical periods at the university, so a lot of that finds its way into my writing.

What I do notice is that my characters seem to flesh themselves out with different aspects of my own personality and experiences. My take on Star Swirl the Bearded is essentially me at my most confident (and most vain), a workaholic loner who does not understand other ponies, and does not care what anyone thinks of him. My Clover the Clever is me at my least confident, who works hard to try to Learn the Rules for How Things Work and Do Things Properly, sublimating her own personality in the process. I recently wrote my first story to get into the feature box, about Big Mac's inner life, and I confess I peppered Big Mac's mental state with some of my own tics and fears.
Ahem. Yeah, since I'm a huge neurotic my stories tend to focus a lot on people's inner life and how things can clash and malfunction as a result. Does that count as writing what you know?

My childhood was essentially living inside of Golden and Silver Age science fiction books. Heinlein, Asimov, Bradbury, Zenna Henderson, Fredrick Brown - you name it. My dad made maps; I moved every three to six months, so I never had friends for long, and I was always the new kid, always singled out. My father was a violent, psychopathic man, my mother broke mentally when I was eleven.

Being transsexual made me singled out from birth, too, and try as I might, I could never manage to act according to the gender expected of my perceived sex. So, I was beaten and bullied and worse. Books were my life, my escape, my education, my society and my world. The library the only stability in my life.

As soon as I was able (age 20), I got my body fixed and started my proper life. I put together a family, my three spouses, and we have had an adventurous, wonderful life for the past thirty years. I may have suffered truly horribly in childhood, but in much of my later adulthood... I have been a very fortunate woman indeed.

Moving so much, seeing so much of the world, meeting so many people, and the many adventures of my transition and the last thirty years all inform my writing. I have seen more of the world, and how it works, than most people could ever imagine, I think. I have lived with runaways in the streets, and shared group therapy sessions with the sons and daughters of the wealthiest of the elite, the people who actually run the world behind the illusion of government. I have worked in media, for companies from Epyx to Hasbro, and at flipping burgers... and even picking scraps from dumpsters to survive. I have slept on rooftops to avoid being killed or raped, and I have gone to parties where a billionaire showed me his collection of automobiles, any one of which cost more than most people's homes... or entire financial worth.

Every story I write, every character I create, is always based on something, or someone, real from my life. A given experience, event, or character might be taken from my own life, or the life of a friend or acquaintance, I simply paint whatever it is in Pony and Science Fiction, and thus mine my experience for my novels.

And that seems to work for me. It adds a verisimilitude to my stories, I think, because when I write them, I am writing truth. Reality. Actual people and events and facts... just gussied up in fantastic trappings. I think the reality has weight and gravitas. I think that this comes through. It certainly informs my feeling as I write - my writing process feels like real life to me, no matter how fantastical the surrounding conceit that clothes it all.

It is also a private joy for me - I can go through my stories, and in them find a litany of my experiences, a roster of people I have known, all dressed up as ponies, or humans, or events made more colorful by the paint of alien universes and decades in the future.

I cannot imagine being able to write well without as complicated a life experience as I have had. I suffered a very great deal for much of it, but it has also informed me, and gifted me with a very useful hoard of substance to draw upon. I thus have mixed feelings about my life: it was often horrible, but it is a treasure trove of material for storytelling!

3229583 Dang. That's some rough (and unusual) stuff.

I started reading and at

I moved every three to six months, so I never had friends for long, and I was always the new kid

I was all "Hey, we have stuff in common" but I've never had it half that hard, my dad was an awesome guy, he just couldn't stay put. (Still can't, my parents are in the process of moving again right now, even though he keeps making plans to stay and stop moving.)

Lots of my life experiences have shown up in my stories, some of them gussied up and made all pretty, and some of them not so much.

I was going to add something more insightful, but I completely forgot what it was...oh well....

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The most important theme in a lot of my writings seems to be 'family'... and that stems from my grandparents on my mother's side. The whole family is just so tightly knit. I've seen my own family fall apart when our dad left, but the unity in my mother's family always held, with every birthday party being a giant feast with everyone invited, and everyone bringing cakes and pies of all kinds.

Just today, we went to my grandmother's 85th birthday party. A load of her own siblings and cousins were there (those that didn't stay in the USA after WW2), then her own children, all with their children (my generation; my siblings and cousins), and the slowly growing generation coming after us, including my sisters' kids.

It's just... wonderful to be around them, and that feeling of being able to depend on family is definitely present in my writings.

(which is why I decided to add "Flitter" to the group's stories. Family seems like a topic that suits the group )

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I find that my life experiences color my writing and my reading. With reading it tends to weed out the stuff that is painfully obvious when the author has no real or practical experience(Clopfics, I'm looking at you...).

With writing, it lets me lay down a very stable basis for story construction around the types of experience I've had. I think that's why I write so much stuff involving the Princesses. I identify with their experience based wisdom.

Considering that this is the Over the Hill Authors group, I feel that can write the following without pulling some punches.

I think that, on a certain level, "write what you know" is a crutch for beginning authors or is only applicable if you are writing in isolation. In some cases it's like training wheels on a bicycle. In the worst case it's an impediment to growing as a writer.

In my opinion you need not have experienced something in order to write about it. Basic human emotions are the building blocks of any story: happiness, sadness, fear, joy, pain, love, wonder, anger, confusion and so on - these are the flour, eggs, sugar, butter, and milk in the cake-baking of writing. Everything else is just flavours and frosting, which can be mixed, matched, and made up as you go along. If you haven't experienced the basics in any way, shape, or form, then you're already facing an uphill battle when it comes to writing. If you have experienced the basics, then do your research and adapt that experience apply to whatever situation you're writing about.

We have at our very finger tips the greatest tool for information, learning, and communication in the history of humanity. If you have an idea for something you don't "know", but you want to write about it: research is your friend. On those rare occassions where I do write, I'll often have several windows/tabs open: one for the story itself, a Google Search window, Wikipedia, the MLP wiki (assuming that I'm writing MLP:FiM fiction, of course) , and IRC (or Skype, or IM/chat tool of choice) to bounce ideas off and get immediate feedback from other people. Talk to people - especially in this fandom, you'll find others more than happy to help and share ideas or their own experiences.

Respectfully,
The Ponytrician.

3234357 Research is definitely a key, I spent quite a while reading up on blast furnaces (and talking to somebody who's worked around 'em, even) for a recent story. I don't think you need to "write what you know" in the sense of only writing things you've literally done. But I do think it shows when you don't know much of anything about how people tick.

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Indeed, it doesn't have to be things that you've literally done. However, when I see the advice being given to "write what you know", I see that as people being advised to limit or avoid challenging themselves; and my response to that is, if I may quote Sir Terry Pratchett: "Bugger that!".

But I do think it shows when you don't know much of anything about how people tick.

True, true. That said, *I* don't know how people tick; I just know how I tick, and extrapolate it to apply to other people. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

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I feel there is a second key point to "write what you know", which is get to know as many things as possible. That way, you can properly write a lot.
On the other hand, Emily Dickinson wrote huge amounts of brilliant poetry about things she had no experience with herself.

This makes me think of that exchange in a late issue of The Sandman (which I don't have available and so can't check for the exact quotes). William Shakespeare is talking to another writer, who says "I go out among people and spend time with them, therefore I understand them." Shakespeare replies "I would have thought all you need to understand people, is to be a person."

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I've used my experiences with failure a few times in writing. Although I haven't published my first attempt at writing using that experience, I did sort of borrow a lot of how I felt and dream experiences to make one of my fics.

I had a nice childhood so I don't really have many negative experiences to draw on, but I have seen quite a bit of death in my family. I do plan on using my own experiences with that in a few fics on this site at some point, but I just haven't written them yet. And to be honest, I've only seen one fic where the author pulled off a death scene that actually felt the way it should.

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Captain Laurence "I get lonely sometimes" Lancaster from this little story tends to relive some of my more awkward military experiences.

Namely, when the Captain of the ship appears suddenly from around a corner, the customary greeting is not "Oh Shit!"

Or when you're in the middle of reading a book about the history and development of the AIM-9 Sidewinder missile - and you get caught in a situation where "the left hand knoweth not what the right hand doth".. eh, I'll stop right there.

I'm sure there's other bits and pieces that leaked into Laurie's character, though certain instances like demonstrating what "missionary position" is to some idiot in bootcamp, or chasing a Lieutenant Commander while running backwards and asking if he wants to become an "ASSSSSStronaut" probably aren't meant for a story involving magical cartoon horses.

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Nice topic, SParks. Thanks for posting it.

Also, this is my first post here. I've been a member of this group for a little while now. I guess it's about time I posted something, huh?

I really can't think of a time while writing when I wasn't touching on some past experience no matter what it may have been about. Not meaning to brag and I say this humbly but I consider myself (and gratefully so) one of those individuals who has done many things, experienced much, from spending several years when I was very young hitch hiking all over the country to having been an oil rig worker, an artist (which, sadly, I can't do anymore because of glaucoma), a drunk (recovering these last 24 years), among other things, and everything from an a**hole and a saint! (That last part, obviously, I add jokingly.)

Without the life experiences I've had I don't think I'd be a writer because, honestly, I don't think I'd have anything to write about!