Mining Your Life for Stories

By ​Teel James Glenn

All he world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts….
As You Like it by William Shakespeare
 
There is an old adage among writing teachers that says ‘write what you know” which is perhaps the most limiting thing a writer can listen to. Imagine only being able to write about your MFA program or limiting your story possibilities to your high school experiences? Or stories that take place only in your small town?

The truth of it is that a good writer uses the source material of their own life to inform the human reactions in their fiction and the worlds one builds in those stories but just as a start.

Obviously, someone who has had a limited life experience would seem to be at a disadvantage if you wanted to tell a story in another time and place. Say, if one wishes to write a World War Two tale and were born in the 1960s you sure can’t draw on your own life experience, but you can draw on other people’s lived experience by doing research! First person sources, like diaries, journals, news reports or even old movies that show actual locations become a big help.

But period research only gives you the ‘outside’ of a story, that is, what it looks like, maybe even what it sounded like. It is up to the author to get inside the characters, to imagine yourself in that scenario and to imbue the people with the human qualities you have observed in your own life. Even if the characters are not human.

 This is where the ‘write what you know’ applies—you know what mud feel like under your feet, how rain in your face feels, you can extrapolate fear and joy and terror that one might experience in a combat circumstance. The same applies to any location or experience outside your own personal life—research obsessively (at least I do)-- to give it verisimilitude-- and as if you were an actor imagine yourself in the shoes of your character and inhabit them in this new world you have created.

And less you think this applies to only historical or fantasy worlds, remember—in any story you write you have to create the entire reality for the reader. You have to give them not only the color and shape but the feel of the reality that your character is in. Not everyone knows what being in New York is like, or how walking across the Arizona desert feels.

So, a real world on the page--especially in a world where your writing might be read by a world-wide audience. You have to assume your readers are coming on this journey with you for the first time and give them all they need to know.
How is all this relevant to the whole life-mining process? Isn’t this just simple research, basic writing protocols?

Yes and no. I am one of the writers fortunate enough to have had a, shall we say, a colorful life, before turning my full attention to writing. I’ve been shot, stabbed, set on fire, hit by cars and thrown downstairs.

I worked as a book illustrator, a haunted house barker, a bodyguard, a fight choreographer, teacher, actor, jouster and professional stuntman. Most of that list was in professional capacities, and some of it was for real—I have the scars to prove it.

Somewhere in the middle of a tough stunt years ago I decided that while I could always fall down, eventually I would not be able to get up—so I started writing. Part time at first and over a twenty-year period I had work published in magazines, anthologies and then novels, all in a number of genres. Fantasy, mystery, adventure… and then I decided to combine them all in a new series; The Weird Casefiles of Jack Silence!

In Jack Silence is a former stuntman and actor with a penchant for quoting Shakespeare and lives in a realistically drawn New York where The Convergence has happened—the world of the Fey overlays on ours.

The laws of physics and science no longer apply, and the old magicks have begun to creep back in. Not all at once, mind you, but gradually and with seemingly arbitrary rules. It’s a slow-motion apocalypse where internal combustion engines no longer work but magick carpets do; climate change has nothing on this set of circumstances.

Gargoyles, Pixies, Gnomes, Dragons and all sorts of creatures we’ve taken for granted were fantasy now walk or fly the streets of the Manhattan Island.

Not all smooth sailing as sometimes when the Fey come through the barrier they go mad and become violent—when that happens you have to call a Parafey eliminator and Jack Silence sets himself up in business using his life skills as the Ghostmaker.

In a mix of detective, adventure and fantasy elements Jack gathers a loyal staff—a zombie receptionist, a living stone Gnome office manager and a psychic banisher named Madam Vixen to help with spirit problems.

I can say without lying every character and many of the action scenes in the world of Jack Silence have an analog in my real life (something those in my writing group have noted ‘did you really do that? Or is he based on me?)—I’ll never tell!

So. if you like grounded fantasy adventures then look for Guns, Goons and Goblins, the first Jack Silence book coming out next October from Level Best Books!

To quote the bard—To be a well-favored man is the gift of fortune; but to write and read comes by nature.”

 
Teel James Glenn has killed hundreds and been killed more times—on stage and screen, as forty-plus years as a stuntman, then he decided to do something risky: become an author.

He has dozens of published books in multiple genres, and his poetry and stories have been printed in over two hundred magazines, including Weird Tales, Mystery, Pulp Adventures, Mad, Black Cat Weekly, Cirsova, and Sherlock Holmes Mystery.
He is a Shamus, Silver Falchion and Derringer finalist and won Best Novel 2021 in the Pulp Factory Award and winner of the 2012 Pulp Ark Award for Best Author.
His website is: TheUrbanSwashbuckler.com Facebook: Teel James Glenn  Bsky: @Teelglenn