Every writer tells stories about their own experiences. Every story is an autobiography of sorts, taking some aspect of the writers life and expanding it into a conflict or even a theme. The story I’m working on now is has a lot to do with my mother and this need to please her/make her extremely proud though I recognize how impossible that is. It is also impossible to avoid my personal relationships filtering into prose like water into the earth and raising stories and situations that, while not resembling the reality in the least, carry the charged emotions of reality.
Honest writing comes from real feelings and conflicts, no matter the genre. Therefore, the best way to be a writer is to accept the good and bad in life as material as opposed to trying to bury it so deep that it never sees the light of day. I couldn’t write an actual autobiography. My life hasn’t risen to the level of universally notable yet. On the other hand, I’d been through so many identifiable experiences by the age of 12 that I can write on those alone for the next decade.
We each have our demons that plague us and define us. Those demons can also be the fuel that powers the situations in our stories. From Huxley, to Phillip K Dick, to Baudelaire and Burroughs, each dealt with demons, coaxing them out of their psyche through words and drugs. I would go so far as to suggest that the most prolific writers are the ones harboring the most demons and that the pen is what kept them from going insane. Sometimes, like in the cases of Woolf, Thompson, and Plath, the words are not enough to excise the demons and they crawl deep inside of you, eating away at the light until all that is left is the desire to die.
I’m not yet the writer any of those greats are, nor do I claim to be gripped by the number and seismic force of the demons that possessed them. I am as most of us are, seeking clarity and understanding. After all, as Virginia Woolf once said, “Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works.”