Writing What You Know

Ever heard the phrase "write what you know"? Ever wonder if some of your favorite authors heeded that advice and to what extreme?

In this episode of A Book and A Dream, Megan O'Russell shares some of her favorite (sometimes ludicrous) real-life encounters and how she wove those moments into her stories, and wonders what would happen if we could ask big name authors about their real-world inspiration.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

There is some like church basement where all of these ladies get together and they're like, how are we going to save these children today because they are not going to make it through life in Manhattan. Welcome to a book in a dream with Megan O. Russell, an author's adventure and writing, reading, and to being an Epic sand girl. Hello, my name is Megan O wrestle and welcome to episode 13 of a book and a dream. Now, today I wanted to talk to you a little bit about how weird little micro moments and realize end up making it into fiction. Now obviously there's that big saying, you know, write what you know, stick to what you know and that is, it doesn't really work in all of fiction and especially fantasy. There would be no centers unless there's some giant government conspiracy to hide the centers that I just haven't heard about, which is possible. Who knows? Anyway, so if you're only supposed to write what you know, it's very limiting and I would never recommend that to anyone unless you're writing a manual or a textbook. If it's fiction. Does your do your research? Obviously, but expand beyond that, but no matter what you choose to write and fiction, there are little moments of reality that are going to bleed into your book, whether you mean them to or not. There are some larger things and intentional things, things that you have greatly researched in order to make sure that your book is accurate and can really draw the reader in. So for me personally, for things like the girl of glass series, it takes place in what's basically a set of biodomes. I'm a little obsessed with greenhouses and biodomes just as a human being. So I've been to a lot of botanical gardens and things like that. I went to the biodomes and Montreal and my honeymoon. It was very cool. There were lots of penguins, awesome time, highly recommended, but once I started diving in to writing girls glass, I actively visited more because I wanted to know what the, it really smelled like, what the different kinds of planting technology currently are, which led to some awesome research trips, you know, Epcot at Disney world. Great, great botanical garden, lots of information there. There's also things like hiking up a mountain like Mount Greylock to make sure it works for the tethering. There are things that I didn't mean to become research when I set out, but it totally did. Um, Cal sock Lake in Thailand ended up in the girl without magic. Uh, Savannah, Georgia played a huge part in the girl cloaked in shadow. But then there are also much smaller moments, like little tiny human interactions that get put into books. And sometimes you don't really mean to and sometimes in your head you're like, aha, this person I remember from forever ago this, this is where I use that interaction. And I started thinking about that smaller scale because I actually received a message from someone I went to college with saying that they had read the girl with glass series and they recognize something that one of our college professors used to say to us constantly in that book. And it was very cool. It's always cool to hear from a reader. It's really cool and a little bit crazy to hear from a reader that you have actually known from years before. Awesome. But it made me think about other than that one little quote, what else have I put into the books, whether I mean to or not that come from real human interactions and there are actually quite a few. Um, if you've read the Taylor Brian Adams series in how I magically messed up my life in four freaking days and moving on from there. Bryant has a set of fairy godmothers in New York city that he doesn't really mean to have, doesn't really understand. But that's totally true. When I lived in New York city, I swear there was a flock of older women who took care of me on a regular basis. I honestly think that they might have meetings, not necessarily specifically for me. I don't think I'm worth that much of anyone's time. But I swear there is some like church basement where all of these ladies get together and they're like, how are we going to save these children today because they are not gonna make it through life in Manhattan. I literally have had an older woman yanked me by the back of the hoodie out of the road cause I was too tired to tell there were calves coming. It's real life. I know I'm a pathetic human being, but it's true. And so that concept made it into the book on a smaller scale. This is a pretty funny story actually. So there is a botanical garden that my husband and I love and we visited for one of their Christmas spectaculars. It was great. There's music, there's a beer garden and we're, we're walking up toward the live music and there are these two, I would say mid fifties women who are going past us and one is stumbling, the other is holding it together and the stumbler looks to her friend and full voice though I'm sure she thought she was whispering, grabs onto the front of her friend's shirt and goes, I'm drunk. I managed to not laugh out loud in the moment, but as they were walking away and I got far enough away that my husband and I could laugh, my husband looked at me and was like, so, which book is Linda going in? And it's true, it's in fracture patch. That's the current title of it. That book has not been published yet, but Linda[inaudible] in that book, Linda is also now synonymous in my head for any dear sweet woman putting up with her drunk and friends. Good for you, Linda. There's a lot of Linda's in this world and they do a lot of work to protect humanity. There's also other things that come from me being weird in real life. I, it's odd as it sounds, the character that is the closest to saying all the weird things that I do is Claire in the tethering to the point that my sister texted me after reading one of the tethering books not long ago, a couple of weeks ago and said, Hmm, so Claire is just you. Yeah. I can't actually argue her with her on that one, except you know, I'm not magical. And I'm not 12 years old, but other than that, yeah, we're, we're basically the same person. There's also a lot of things that have come into the books from my life in theater. So the most obvious of course would be Nettie Cracker suite, which is all about ballet and a lot of the knowledge, the personalities, the insight into the, the joys and horrors of the dance world came from my experience in dance and my years in ballet. And there may or may not be a character that is, you know, Lee and Lee, one of my ballet professors, you know, things like that. And it is that experience that having lived in the world, having worked with people who are basically those characters though I wouldn't necessarily point to someone and be like, Oh, this is, you know, you're completely L no, it's, it's a compilation of little bits of people. And I wouldn't tell them that because I like having friends, but they all go into that to make it realistic. There's another book of mine that is currently still on my agent's desk called Siggy. My words, which is about being in high school and being in musical theater while in high school and there is a specific character in that who is in the LGBTQ community, which a lot of my friends in high school were because I was a theater kid. And that difference in dealing with your theater family where you're safe, where no one's going to care if you're in, you're out, you're halfway there, whatever it is you do you, they're all going to love you anyway versus the reality of the rest of teenage expectations. And so there were a lot of little tiny instances of those interactions between when do I, this is such a sad statement, but when do I have to switch that off in order to survive with non-theater people? When do I have to be me? When do I have to actually perform the part of being someone else as a survival mechanism? And so a lot of that went into singing my words now to not end on, you know, that sad and awful note about what me, you know, put some members of our community through in another book that is hopefully going to be published soon. I'm working on it. Um, fracture pact. There are, it's, there's a book about magic, but there's caterers, there's lots of caterers in this book like you do. And when I was living in Newport, Rhode Island, which is part of where they spend their time in the book, I lived in a mansion doing living history and on weekends and evenings they would do weddings. And so as extra to our actor salary, we could be like a mansion liaison to the caterers, which basically meant making sure the caters didn't set anything on furniture that they shouldn't be touching. We were furniture guards. That's, that's basically it. We were furniture guards. But watching the caterers interact with the super, super rich people and like chaos of it. There are little micro moments of those poor catering managers in that book. And it's one of those things where when I wanted to start writing out notes to do this episode of a book in a dream, I was sitting down and talking to my husband about it because we spend all of our time together, all of it, really, literally all of it. So there's very few interactions that happen in my life that he wasn't there for laughing or judging me, you know, depending on what I'm doing. But I was talking to him about what other things have worked in with these specific moments. And it's one of those, they have become so intrinsically linked in both the book and reality that it was hard for us to pick out those specific instances. Other than things like Linda because all Linda Cortland, duh. So for the writers out there, what micro-moments, what little interactions or people watching moments have you pulled out of your real life and put into your work? And for the readers out there, have you ever read a book and read about a character, a sentence, a quote, whatever, and just stared at it for a second and thought, when did they meet this person? Did this happen? Did someone actually say this to them? Because I'm curious. And it's, it's one of those things where you get into high fantasy and obviously like the guy talking about the dragon, it's probably not pulling that from a conversation in real life. But then even in high fantasy you get two people sitting around a campfire and how much of that conversation is at least based on something that the author actually witnessed or participated in? And it's so fascinating. And I think it would be, maybe we should petition for this for a Comicon panel like CIT J K rolling down Suzanne Collins down, pull in Sarah mass just for fun. And LIBOR do go. We can pull in, I don't know anyone you want. Let's pull in a bunch of major authors and sit down and like do our homework beforehand. So we'll highlight in the books and be like, okay, highlight in the eBooks. Not in the real books cause we're not monsters here. But highlight in the books and ask them like, okay, so this Hagrid quote, did someone really say this to you? This moment between, you know, Kaz and his gang, did that really happen? I think that would be fascinating. But since they don't have the power to call them all to a comic con panel, have you ever found any, maybe we should start conspiracy theories. This could be really fun. Let's start it. What do you think came out of a real moment? I want to know. Alright, so put your comments below so I can get that information cause I desperately want it or post it onto one of my other social media platforms, whatever. I'm everywhere. Also, don't forget to like, subscribe. So you never miss anything. And as always, thank you for joining me for this episode of book industry. See you next time.