The "Is This About Me?" Panic (authors confession)

 

The "Is This About Me?" Panic (and Other Writing Hazards)

When people first learned I was writing books, they did two things: 1. They told me how wonderful it is and promised to buy my book (some did... some didn't) 2. They also ask a similar question—usually by a friend who looks slightly concerned or a family member who has a guilty conscience: "Is this character based on me?"

I’ll be honest with you—the answer is always NO. First of all, writing a book based entirely on real people is a fantastic way to end up with a very short Christmas card list and a very long conversation with a lawyer. But more importantly, reality is often a bit too messy for a tight plot. Real people don’t always follow a three-act structure. They don't always have an "inciting incident" before they go to the grocery store.

However, there is a secret I usually keep to myself while I'm nursing my third cold cup of coffee of the day: while my characters aren't you, they are very much me.

The Frankenstein’s Monster of the Soul

As a struggling author, my bank account might be empty, but my inner life is crowded. When I build a character, I don’t look at my neighbor; I look in the mirror. But it’s like looking into a funhouse mirror that breaks your personality into a thousand jagged shards.

Every hero I write has my idealism—the part of me that still believes, despite everything, that the good guys win. Every villain I draft has my impatience—that dark spark I feel when I’m stuck behind someone at the self-checkout who doesn't know how to scan a bell pepper. My characters are mosaics. I take my own anxiety about the future, my own weird sense of humor, and my own specific fears, and I dial them up to eleven.

I’m not writing about my friends. I’m writing about the different versions of myself that I’m too polite (or too scared) to be in real life. It’s a strange, lonely, and exhilarating way to live. But sometimes, life throws you a curveball that you just have to include, which brings me to one of my favorite stories from the "writing trenches."

The Girl Who Wanted to Die (Fictionally, Of Course)

A while back, I was at a school talking about my journey as an author. At the time, word had gotten out that I was working on my second book. During a break, a student approached me. She was bright, energetic, and had that kind of sharp intelligence that makes you realize the next generation is going to run circles around us.

She leaned in, looking very serious, and said, "I heard you're writing another book."

I nodded, feeling a bit of that authorly pride. "I am!"

"Write me into it," she demanded. But then came the kicker. "And I want you to kill me off."

I blinked. I’ve had people ask to be the hero. I’ve had people ask to be the love interest. I’ve even had people ask to be the villain. But I had never had a middle-schooler look me in the eye and ask for a grizzly, fictional demise. I asked her why, thinking maybe there was some deep, symbolic reason. She just shrugged and said, "It would just be cool."

I didn't have the heart to tell her that killing a character involves a lot of emotional heavy lifting and at least three chapters of grieving. Instead, I did what any writer does when they’re inspired by a weird encounter: I used her first name.

I didn't kill her. I couldn't do it. Instead, she became a character with a spark of that same bold energy. She survived the second book, and as I started drafting my third, she became part of an essential scene. She’s still very much alive, much to her likely disappointment, she’s out there doing great things on the page.

The Life on the Page

That’s the beauty and the struggle of this job. You start with a blank screen and a few fragments of your own personality, and suddenly you have a teenager demanding to be martyred or a villain who shares your taste in snacks. They start as ink and pixels, but they end up as people you worry about while you’re trying to fall asleep.

It’s a grueling process. There are days when the words feel like they’re being pulled out of my head with pliers. There are days when I wonder if anyone will ever care about these "shards of me" as much as I do. But then I think of that student, and I think of the way a good story can make a character feel more real than the person sitting next to you on the bus.

If you’re looking for a story where the characters feel like they could walk off the page (and where nobody gets killed off just because they thought it would be "cool"), I’d love for you to dive into my latest thriller, One Lie Too Far.

One Lie Too Far: Mystery Murder & Suspense - Small-Town Secrets & the Cost of Courage. (Secrets of Whisper Pine Book 3)