Autobiography or Fiction?

A friend asked me recently how much of my writing is autobiographical. It’s a reasonable question and I think it’s worth unpacking. I do mostly write about things I have experienced in some way, but I also draw on the lives of family and friends, and on incidents and stories I hear or read about.

Those experiences often spark an idea which is filtered through my imagination and reshaped by the process of writing. Once they are set in different contexts, they become something else. At that point, I’d say they’ve crossed the line into fiction and are no longer about me or you, the people living in the world, but about the characters who inhabit their own world within the pages of the books I’ve written.

So, Penny and Alicia in In Plain Sight, Jemma and Jean-Luc in Casino Summer, Marco and Rhana in Finding Marco, Li Jie and Ming Lee in Li Jie and the Waterfall of Greater Understanding, Laetitia and Rick in Long Stay at Ryan’s Waterhole, Ben and Freya in U R Luvly, and Azita and Holly in Azita and Me might all have had origins in the real world, but have come to live in my books as fictional characters.