In an article for Writer’s Digest, Margo Harrison says “write what you know” will happen whether you plan it or not. For a long time, Harrison expressly avoided writing fiction inspired by events in her life, rarely even using a contemporary setting. Using her own life as the basis for fiction felt dangerous, too revealing. “In those days, my real life and my fantasy life were worlds apart,” Harrison says. “I didn’t understand then what I do now: that every one of my made-up stories with their faraway settings was still about me.”
In retrospect, Harrison realized that she had written about her fears of bombing the SAT, about feeling lonely and unattractive, and about unwanted attention from older men. She didn’t intend to, but there they were, in SF and fantasy settings.
“It took me decades to understand that I never stopped writing about my own experiences in my fiction—I just disguised them,” Harrison says. “It took me even longer to grasp that those experiences were worthy of being written about.” That self-awareness let Harrison mine her life for inspiration, while understanding how to disguise within her fictional characters. “Lived experience has immense value as raw material for fiction,” Harrison writes. “But it takes the deft hands of imagination to spin that experience into a powerful story—one that may appear to outsiders to have nothing at all to do with the author’s biography.”
