Jane in January – Past Experiences as Writing Inspiration

Trust me on this: Fiction is not the same thing as Memoir…

And, yet, if you ask the people who know me personally to tell you about my novels, they’ll say things like, “Well, when Marilyn wrote Friday Mornings at Nine, it was about our get-togethers over coffee” (my local friends) or “She incorporated a lot of our trip experiences into A Summer in Europe” (my husband) or “I think with According to Jane she was sort of snidely writing about her family, her old boyfriends, and her life in high school” (my relatives).

Hey, that’s what they’d probably SAY, but I’m not admitting to anything, LOL  😛  .

One of the truths about fiction, though, is that it needs to feature significant details about the characters and their lives. These details have to come from somewhere, and they must be important enough to the narrative to be worth sharing in the story. While we can use our imaginations to create wild permutations of personality traits and character quirks, we’ve all had experiences with people in real life who have behaved like Jane Austen’s flirtatious Lydia Bennet or domineering Lady Catherine or snippy Caroline Bingley. We’ve met an obsequious Mr. Collins or a stingy John Dashwood or, if we were luckier, a thoughtful and gentlemanly Mr. Knightley. And we also know that humans can combine more than one key quality — the way Mr. Darcy was both very proud and unerringly honorable, or how Captain Wentworth was capable of holding a massive grudge and, yet, being intensely loyal.

Austen looked deep into human behaviors and drew out the ones that were so universal as to be almost immediately recognizable by all of us, independent of our age, gender, religious affiliation, time period, or culture. So, was she writing about her personal experiences when she penned Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion and her other novels and stories? In my opinion, yes, of course! She played around with who on the page had which formal title, and what, specifically, they said to each other in conversation, as well as where, precisely, they lived, etc., etc., but I’m willing to bet that she got at the heart of who these characters were BECAUSE they were drawn from close observations of real people.

When I began work on my Mirabelle Harbor series, I created a fictional town — which has striking similarities in layout to an Illinois city on the shores of Lake Michigan where I once lived — and a cast of characters who inhabited professional worlds I’m either familiar with or about which I could ask people I knew for details (teachers, booksellers, personal trainers, DJs, artists, journalists, bakers, actors, musicians, athletes…). Some personal events provided direct inspiration for these stories, too — although, sadly, I never got to date my teenage movie star crush, like my heroine in The One That I Want, LOL — and Jane Austen’s novels were a frequent source of inspiration with the entire series, too, especially when it came to themes, plotlines, and those all-important family dynamics.

For my Jane in January giveaway, just leave a comment below (it can be about anything from this post and/or about some of your favorite occupations for heroes & heroines) for your chance to win an ebook copy of one of my Mirabelle Harbor books — your choice!! They’re all standalone stories, and you can learn more about all seven of them HERE! The giveaway is open internationally. The random drawing will take place on February 7th (around noon, Central Time), and the winner’s name will be posted in the comment section of this page.  🙂  Wishing you all a wonderful end to the first month of 2019 and a very happy start to the month of romance ahead!!

xo, Marilyn