“Begin my studies with this paper and this pencil; and I’m working through the grammar of my fears”

What exactly would be the grammar of your fears?  This post’s title come from the song “Language or the Kiss” by the Indigo Girls, from their Swamp Ophelia album.

I’ve long thought that as writers we put ourselves into our writing.  Not just that we create worlds, but we inhabit those places.  A part of us is in every structure and every story arc.  And I’m not just talking about non-fiction writers who obviously fill their experiences into their writing.  I’m talking about fiction and poetry writers.

I know that I find myself constantly sticking in things about my life within the walls of stories that I’ve written.  Some authors stick to familiar ground when writing and set all of their stories in areas that they’ve lived.  Other writers add significant historical events into their stories that impacted their lives.  Then you have the authors that name characters and places after people they know.

Finally you come to people like me.  I take all the quirky things in my life fill my landscapes with them.  My character’s oddities are sometimes taken from my world.  In one story I had a character who had a game that she had to do to fall asleep every night.  She would think of a topic, and then start at the letter A and come up with something for each letter until she hit Z.  If she couldn’t fall asleep she would then pick another topic, and start it all over again.

That’s my quirk.  I’ve always had a hard time unwinding when I try to go to sleep and my mind won’t shut off.  Instead of thinking about the millions of things going on in my life and not being able to get to sleep I created that little “game” to get to sleep at night.  It’s different and somewhat off-beat, so I ended up giving that same trait to one of my characters.

I wonder how much of themselves other author’s put into their writing?  Am I just so quirky that I can’t keep it contained?  What part of you has seeped into your stories?

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