He's Not Me. I'm Not Him.

One of the hardest things to understand or explain about writing fiction, is the weird trance-like magic that turns real experiences into made up stories.

"You Might Not Remember Me," is set in a small seaside town on Cape Breton Island, in Nova Scotia. The year is 1994. The main character is Danny, a 17 year old boy. He gets his first job at a restaurant. He does a really crappy job of washing dishes.

I grew up in a small seaside town in Cape Breton. During the summer of 1994, I was 17 and working at a restaurant. I was told, more than once, that I was possibly the worst dishwasher in the history of soap and water. (Dear potential future readers : don't worry, there's a lot more to the story than a teenager washing dishes. I promise. Please still buy my book. – ed.)

The thing is, Danny isn't me. The town isn't the same one I grew up in. The restaurant? Totally different.

But it's pretty obvious that some significant elements of the story are drawn from real life. It wasn't planned, it just kind of turned out that way. The part of my brain that remembers stuff played a complicated game of Broken Telephone with the part of my brain that makes stuff up and writes stuff down, and the resulting first draft was sort of stuck between the worlds of reality and fiction.

For a while, this was a problem. While every other character in the book was entirely made up, Danny had a bit too much me in him. Instead of letting him do his own thing, and be his own character, I found that I was basing his actions and words on what I would have said or done under the same circumstances. As a result, some of the other characters, who were free to be themselves, felt more authentic to me than the guy who was actually telling the story.

Thankfully, I have a great editor, who has put a great deal of work into helping me find the story behind all the words. We spent a lot of time getting rid of the unnecessary stuff that was clogging up the story, and now the focus has shifted back to the characters and their motivations. This week somehow, there was a shift in the way I saw things – instead of viewing the story through Danny's eyes, I started to view it through my own eyes, and for the first time I was truly able to start seeing Danny as an entirely separate person.

Actually, entirely separate is probably overstating it. Every character has something of the writer in him or her, there's just no avoiding it. So when my next book comes out, don't be surprised if the main character, the mystical aardvark warrior Princess SmooMoo from the Planet Fleeth 37, just happens to be a terrible dishwasher.