RWCC Challenge: Day 16: Road Trip Wednesday

Greetings!

So today's Road Trip Wednesday topic is: Who have you written into a book--be honest.

What? I've never written anyone I know into a book. You're crazy. . .

Of course, I'm lying, but as it happens, I try to avoid doing this at all cost.

The first book I ever wrote, which will never see the light of day ever again (it is safely hidden away in a plastic tub inside of a notebook, affectionately dubbed "The Bloom Book") was written in 10th grade. It was called Livvie's Story. I know, what an awful title, but I was in 10th grade. Who cared?

Anyway, I spent all day and all night working on this book and at first I was in love with it. But then, a friend asked if she could be in the book and I thought to myself, sure why not. So I wrote her into it. However, soon after this others started to ask to be in it as well. And because I was 15 and I loved my friends more dearly than anyone else in the world, I obliged.

Long story short, I finished the book (a feat I have since not been able to replicate) but I hated it. I couldn't even look at it. By adding my friends into it, it had turned into something that I really, really, really hated.

It wasn't because I hated my friends or anything. It was mostly because it just wasn't the story I had envisioned anymore. Since then I have done my best to stray away from adding people I know in real life into my writing. . . However. . .

I may or may not have added a boy I had a HUGE crush on in third grade into something I've written. He used to throw things at me in class and make fun of me, you know, act like boys did when they liked a girl in grade school. I transfered schools in third grade and didn't see him again until I was in 11th grade when I was at the library. He walked up to me and our conversation went something like this:

Him: Hi, April.
Me: Oh, hi. Long time no see.
Him: Yeah. So my mom said the reason I was mean to you when we were in grade school was because I liked you, but I just wanted to let you know that I didn't like you.
Me: Oh. . . Okay. . .
Him: Okay. . . Bye.

I assumed that things like can't possibly happen in real life because who's really worried about who did or didn't like someone in third grade, especially since I never spoke to him ever again since I left the school, but whatever, I decided I had to write it down because people had to also look at that story and say "of course it's in a book because that would never ACTUALLY happen" when I'll know that it did because it happened to me.

There are other people I've written into my work, disguised very carefully as minor characters or characters that are written in for the soul purpose of being fridge stuffing. Basically, if I wrote someone I know in real life into my work it's because they were A) Really interesting or B) Made me want to choke them.

None of those people, nor the boy from 3rd grade, are mentioned by name and I'm willing to bet that if they read my stuff they'd never notice it was them.

Have I ever written myself into a book? No. But, I have taken certain characteristics from personality, inflated them, and then attached them to a character as a way to have a little bit of myself in every book which I think is fair and I think everyone does it subconsciously anyway.

The people in our everyday lives are a part of our experiences right? And, as a writer, we write about our experiences and what not, so, that being the case, people are bound to end up in our books if they were a part of our lives if they have a good (or bad) enough impact on us.

Fare thee well,
April