You novelists here: what is the topic of your novel, and how far does it diverge from your life?

I always thought it would be interesting to have a fictional biography of a person working at a coffee shop, and it would show developments of the customers as they shared little moments every morning for a year. Fell free to take it. Just throwing out ideas.

I’m having a hard time with my novel. It’s about farmers, but I’m not much of a farmer. A lot of what I write is very slightly modified autobiography, and if I try to veer away from that, I get stuck. And I’m only 17 years old, so I generally end up writing about people my age, which is not what I want to write about.

That probably doesn’t help. I’m sort of in the same boat as you.

It’s about the dissolution of an experimental community because of the way its leaders corrupted its ideals from the beginning. One person’s need to break away from its very strong bonds challenges those powers and exposes the corruption layer by layer. This is not my life experience at all; it’s made up. But I am using material from parts of my life, my learning, and my second-hand experience and putting them together in a new package.

Sequel to another novel—like the GWTW sequel, only without the Southern accents.

If and when I ever get around to writing my book, it will almost certainly be a memoir. I have lived a rather turbulent and interesting life, so I have a rich well to draw from.

My main project right now is a speculative fiction piece about the aftermath of an engineered plague that killed nearly all of the human race. It’s from the point of view of a young woman who went crazy with the isolation and has to re-adjust when she finds a survivor colony. Obviously it’s not anything like my life because the world has not ended, but I imagine I would act something like that main character were such a situation to arise.

I tend to deal with fantasy, so I don’t have to deal with my life much at all!

Actually, more seriously, I do tend to get a lot of inspiration from places I’ve been, particularly old buildings; those can inspire lots of things—I just look at them and see what comes to mind. That’s how my current story developed.

@minderrantry: what subgenre(s) of fantasy do you work in? I.e., what are your novels like?

@daloon: nothing too exciting, pretty much your typical high-fantasy… Not ‘grand’ per se, in the manner of Lord of the Rings, but rather in keeping with much of the modern fare… Though overall I like to draw on history a bit more—keeping characters human (in my current story, the ‘elves’ are also human, just reinterpreted through fear/misunderstanding, in the manner of many superstitions, for example), toning magic down a bit… Is that what you’re asking?

@MindErrantry: Pretty much. Elves and magic tells me a lot. My favorite is the kind of stuff Michael Swanwick or Walter JOn Williams do. I see WJW has a new nover out, though it’s supposed to be more sf than f.

I’ve always thought that the adage of writing what you know holds some water. What I write stems directly from things that I think and feel and that I’ve experienced. I’m really into stream of consciousness, so the autobiographical aspects of my ideas really come through.

My newest novel involves the humorous interactions/conversations with Evelyn, the deity that is three hundred foot tall and likes flatulence jokes, with the guy who discovered her, and that guy has a lot in common with me. Well, except that he is better looking and has a far more interesting life. I like to write humor and to put my characters in really strange situations. A normal sized guy interacting with a three hundred foot tall immortal woman makes for some great situations.

Interesting. Daloon, I actually have a very similar problem. What to talk about?
I think the furthest I got was this play I wrote called Craig & Miriam.

At the core of the piece is an image from my own life.. of entering the house one day and suddenly just being assaulted by the sounds of gunshot from my bf’s video game; and the one of the major themes I’m asking in this play (what is our capacity for violence) comes from a dream I had where I physically battered a snake to death in order to save my dog.

So thematically, the kernel of this work comes from my experience. However, the characters have since then developed their own personalities and therefore dictate their own courses of action. Also, actually seeing actors take on the role (I tested it out as a graduation project) transposes and transforms it again away from my life.

It’s unfinished, though. It’s been 2 years, and every so often, suddenly I will get a flash of a new scene… I’d love to go back to it sometime and work on it properly…

Clones and obesity. I don’t know anything about either.

I know this is an ancient question that everyone has long since probably unsubscribed from, but I couldn’t help but answer.

Hermit promises himself the night before freshman orientation that college will be different. No longer would he be the man behind the camera or the nameless chauffeur. He is going to live life on the dance floor. He finally get his chance when he meets the beautiful and enigmatic Diana, a quirky senior with a haunted past. But when his lucid dreams seem to be giving him clues about his new love’s background, as well as a new imminent danger she could be facing, he is forced to decide whether it is best to take a chance and save her from a recurring cycle of abuse, or to keep living vicariously through his own dreams as the Hypnonaut.

Many of the settings are loosely based on actual places that I frequent, and most of the characters (especially Diana) are composites of people I actually know.

The story, however, is not a reflection of my own. Fiction is fiction, despite the bits and pieces of myself that have found their way into my book.

@Fiddle_Playing_Creole_Bastard: I once heard someone say that you can tell more about the author than the subject matter when you read a book. :)

@KatawaGrey, despite my claims to the contrary, it’s very true