Somewhere in the 18th Century--when people began to write about new literature that was emerging--some scholar conjectured that every author had one big book inside them. Not only one big book, but certainly one real fabulous book.
I'm reading dozens of books by the same few authors, and I'm coming to believe that each of them did write one fabulous story, but then had to struggle to write another good one. (I'm not going very far with this idea, so I'm not going to hunt down examples to support my hypothesis, to convince you.) The implication is that the best stories were autobiographical; they were drawn from the author's own life. Because the amount of true-to-life detail they would otherwise have to dream up would be daunting for the typical author. (At the moment I'm reading about a woman writing in the first person, and she describes her whole blended family, their occupations, their history, their attitudes ... Not that a writer with a good imagination couldn't do that, but it isn't easy!)
In my own case, I'm in deathly fear of destroying my alias, and if I borrow from my own life too heavily, and someone I know reads this stuff, it won't be hard for them to join the dots!
You have to understand that everything an author writes is drawn from his or her life. Everything. But if the author is careful, it can be modified enough that it won't be spotted and recognized by others who shared the actual event or experience.
For instance, there is an episode in Helen, in which she helps Janet to run a summer tennis clinic. In another episode, years later, she tells Jeffrey that she helped with a tennis camp. I have friends who are into tennis in a big way, though I myself am not, and that's how come I know lots of trivia about how the game of tennis goes.
In Jane, for instance, I use lots of experiences from my own life--not going to tell you which ones--but the events are so fragmentary that you probably couldn't draw any inferences from them!
Another topic entirely: Hyphens and Dashes
This subject is probably well understood by many of you, but unfortunately those who have this strong urge to write, may not have been the ones who paid attention in English Composition. (I paid attention, and I had an excellent teacher. But many high- school kids are too distracted--with sports, or cheerleading, or romance, or MMOG's--to listen to their teachers.)
In the paragraph above, did you spot the dashes? On this page, it comes out as -- two hyphens. This is because it isn't easy to make the actual dash (if I find out how, I'll put one inside these parentheses — There it is!! You press and hold the hyphen key, and a little mini- menu pops up. Slide your finger up to the mini- menu, and select the longest dash. There are two others; just ignore them), so I (and other bloggers who care about these thing) use an acceptable substitute, the two hyphens.
Do the actual hyphens ever get used? Well, yeah, for some double-barreled names, like Huntingdon-Whitley; or some words that are usually hyphenated, like ... Jeeze, I can't think of one when I need an example ... oh: double- barreled gun, f'rinstance.
The dashes (or even fake dashes) usually occur in pairs, like parentheses. If you left out the part inside, or in between, the dashes, what's left should make sense. Of course it should make even more sense with the stuff in ťhe dashes!
In the above, once I discovered how to do an actual dash, I didn't change all my fake dashes, so that you'd know how to insert fake dashes. Always the teacher; that's me. Sometimes I use so many semi-colons that I feel embarrassed! It looks a little bit learned ...
Kay Hemlock Brown
