Emma, who is four and a half years old, gave a tea party today. Half the guests were missing and there was no tea in the pot, but that didn’t matter to Emma. She used her imagination.

This is just like writing fiction, I thought as she poured me a cup of air tea. You start with some real props (her Lady Bug tea set and me) and make up the rest as you go along.

When you want to fictionalize your life in a short story or a novel, your props might be a theme that you want to explore, a true life setting, some characters who may be real people in your life (more about them later), and emotion. The emotion is important. And it’s not really a prop of course – it’s the engine of your fiction. Hopefully you also have fragments of a story. Something happens in fiction. Your characters want/need something, they struggle for it, things go wrong, and in the end they either get it (happiness, peace, the girl/boy, money, property, understanding etc.), or they don’t. But there’s action in the struggle. They don’t just sit around thinking about it like we usually do in real life.

If you started a novel about your own experience and got stuck early on, maybe it’s because you’re writing too close to the truth, you’re writing what really happened. (This is something students are always announcing about their fiction: And it really happened! As my agent friend Aaron says, “Better it shouldn’t have happened.”) There are no plots in real life. Life is usually a mess. That’s one of the reasons why we read fiction; we want cause and effect, we want order, we want a plot, a story with a beginning, middle and ending. We need meaning.

If you want to write exactly what really happened, write a memoir or personal essay. If you want to write fiction then let your imagination lose with a few props from your real life. In fiction you get to use the emotion of your real life but also to wear masks and veils, and then really, really tell the truth. The deep down truth that even you don’t realize until you write it, hidden in someone else’s skin.

Your real life is just a launching pad for fiction. The fun of fiction is that you get to make up stuff.

Meanwhile back at the tea party Emma pretended her cousins were the other guests, and made up dialog for Axel, who is two and never had a cup of tea in his life, expounding on how much sugar and milk he’d like in his tea. And then she came up with a whole riff by Grace who is ten months old and can’t talk yet.

Stories are what show up on the page once you start hitting the keys.  Larry McMurtry

To Do: Write a short scene of what Jerome Stern in his wonderful book Making Shapely Fiction calls a bear at the door story. There’s a bear at the door and it’s big and he’s trying to get in and somebody’s got to do something. Maybe your “bear” is a long lost relative, or a car accident, a storm, or somebody finding out she’s pregnant… Start it as a five minute exercise and see what pops up.