Life Experiences

How can we equate life experience with a book theme? This is a question authors ask themselves all the time. We’ve all experienced life in many different ways. Finishing school, landing a dream job, having a family, seeing places we’ve always wanted to visit. Those are just a few things that can give us life experiences.
So many of my books are for teens and these stories encompass themes from underage drinking to school violence to non-custodial parental kidnapping and so much more. One of the things I always do before settling down to put a book together is to research the subject thoroughly. Yes, I do research for fiction. Doesn’t everyone? Don’t you want the tiny facts right, so no one feels as if you just tossed the book together without any concern for facts?
There are other reasons for doing research. When first starting on the background for Take Chances, I spent a lot of time developing the background of the characters. Because Julie had experienced a violence situation in another school while overseas, I need to know how many school shooting incidents had occurred, when they started, and was this just a problem within the United States. (It’s not but that’s a subject for a different blog.)
After getting all the major information together, I began the painstaking task of ensuring the minor information would fit the storyline. Showing a person’s self-centered attitude can be done so well when their child is wearing jeans and a t-shirt while Mom is decked out in the latest designer apparel. Bringing out the self-centered attitude of adults when their children are concerned about others in their school became a lesson in preparing a meal for a picky eater who called it trash.
All of these tropes have been used by many authors. To be honest, there are no new themes in books. What makes a great book stand out is how the information is presented. That’s when you spend months if not years ensuring the opening of your book snatches the reader by the throat and you only ease up a bit on that sensation as you let your story grow.
This is where life experience comes into play in a big way. Think back to all the times when you were going through a problem in your life. Sure, you have told people it happened without warning, but as an author you’ve learned how to parse out those memories and break them down into seconds, where you’ll learn that in fact you had a sense of this situation coming to bear, you just didn’t realize it with everything else going on. This is how you use things that happened to you as a teen to build the tension in your story.
A lot of people will give you advice about being a good writer. Only a few realize that sticking with brought them to this field is by using life experiences always adds a touch of realism that is so desperately needed in today’s books.


About K.C. Sprayberry
Born and raised in Southern California’s Los Angeles basin, K.C. Sprayberry spent years traveling the United States and Europe while in the Air Force before settling in northwest Georgia. A new empty nester with her husband of more than twenty years, she spends her days figuring out new ways to torment her characters and coming up with innovative tales from the South and beyond.                                                                                                  She’s a multi-genre author who comes up with ideas from the strangest sources. Those who know her best will tell you that nothing is safe or sacred when she is observing real life. In fact, she considers any situation she witnesses as fair game when plotting a new story.

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