I don’t use a lot of real life inspiration in my writing. When I was a kid and first started writing, every main girl character was really the best version of myself I could come up with. But, as I got older, especially as I began to write romance, I kept real life and fictional life very much separate.
Except when it comes to setting. Most of my novels are either set in somewhere real or somewhere I have personally experienced. When I wrote my first completed novel, the heroine worked at a gas station… because I did too. Even though none of her colleagues were based on people I worked with, when I pictured her in the gas station, I was picturing the gas station I worked in.
Right now, I am working on a novel that is set in a place very dear to my heart. There is something both really fun and really hard about using a setting that is not only personal but important.
It’s fun visiting this place in my mind, almost like visiting in person, and I get a kick out of thinking that someday this could be published and this real place could be shared in a fictional way.
But, it’s also really hard and daunting. Hard because I know it so well, I sometime neglect important details (though my CP points those out to me), and daunting because even though everything that happens and all the people are fictional, the place is real and I want to do some justice to it, even as just a background for a romance novel.
It’s just another challenging aspect to this WIP, but it has its perks too.
Nicole Helm 