How Much Of ME Is In My Stories?

"Write what you know" is something writers will be told a thousand times over (to which I'll offer my own addendum of "learn how to write what you don't know").

Drawing inspiration from our memories, lived experiences, culture, and emotions can be a great place to start a story and add a layer of authenticity to your writing. It's exploring what makes us human and building that connection with the reader, whether you're wanting to leave them feeling warm and fuzzy or picking the pieces of their heart off the floor after they finish the last page of your story. A chance to not only feel seen but to tell your readers that you see them.

Writers are known to weave pieces of themselves into their stories, sometimes more intentionally than others. I suppose it's inevitable. The act of writing is often one vulnerability. Or you're like me and can't resist the urge to add a nod to an inside joke or hide an Easter egg that connects two otherwise unrelated stories.

It's been a while since my last Q&A-style post, so I posted on IG to see what readers would be interested in seeing on the blog. Monique responded, "I want to know if anything from your books is inspired by you!"

It also ties into a coworker's question about whether or not Zach in Bound to the Heart is a self-insert character; if you're not in the know, there's a "book club" at the escape room I work at, devised by the coworkers who "bullied" me into letting them read one of my WIPs—their verb choice, not mine!

Writing is said to be pouring your heart and soul onto the page, so it stands to reason that little pieces of myself would drift into my writing, whether by design or by complete happenstance. Not to mention the times I've learned about myself through my characters and discovered pieces of them in me.

In this post, I'll be highlighting a small handful of them.

If you're new to the blog, hello and welcome! I'm a not-yet-published writer of Regency Era romances at various stages ranging from vague idea to the throes of self-editing. In the event that any of these projects catch your eye and you'd like to add them to your TBR, be sure to sign up for my newsletter and follow me on social media to follow my writing journey. I'd love to have you along for the ride. ♡

Is Zach A Self-Insert?

Before I can answer my coworker's question about Zach being a self-insert character, I need to provide a little context.

Bound to the Heart is set in London and follows a bookbinder and a hopeless romantic with a love of reading and an overbearing mother. I wrote the first draft during my senior year of college, as part of my research project for a travel course to London. I focused on bookbinding and printing, with the creative aspect of my project being a printed and bound version of that first draft.

Zach was the conveyor belt of my research in that early iteration of the story because, let's face it, it was a stupidly long research paper. It was dense and clunky, reading more like a stodgy textbook than a novel (something I'm continuing to grow out of even in newer projects). Eve's questions about bookbinding were there so I could cover aspects of my research I hadn't been able to touch on otherwise.

That coworker has also seen Mega Notebook 2.0, which is comprised of six mini, flimsy notebooks I decided to bind together into one massive notebook (complete with a ribbon bookmark and title page); Mega Notebook 1.0 didn't last as I'd used upcycled cardboard from bedspread packaging for the cover, as opposed to the sturdier chipboard of Mega Notebook 2.0, which hosts the handwritten draft of A Tided Love.

In other words, though I wouldn't say I'm good at it, I do know a thing or two about bookbinding. But rather than it being something that I included in a story because it's an interest of mine, it's something I picked up because of the story. And I love having that connection to Zach.

Eve And The Cahow

Bound to the Heart was only my second go at writing a novel (the first will likely never see the light of day). And since many new writers learning to develop characters will base their characters on themselves, did I base Zach's love interest, Eve, on myself?

In a lot of ways... kind of? But not intentionally.

The similarities are there. She's a bookworm who's had far more dreams of romance than experience with it, which I could definitely relate to as I was writing it.

I did draw inspiration for the premise of Eve's favorite book, The Cahow, from the first season of Poldark. The BBC drama and books by Winston Graham open with Captain Ross Poldark returning home from the Revolutionary War to the surprise of everyone who presumed him dead, upon which he learns that his father has died and left him the estate (and its debts), and that his sweetheart is set to wed his cousin. The Cahow sees a similar premise, with its hero believed to have perished at sea, ending up in Bermuda for a time before returning to England where his lover is engaged to another man.

The title of that book is a nod to another class I took in college, Literature and the Environment. One of our reading assignments was a short story about man's contribution to the demise of the Bermuda Petrel, or the Cahow. The bird was believed to be extinct for three hundred years until it was sighted in 1951.

Though the fictitious The Cahow novel is named for the ship its protagonist was aboard, it's fitting for the man himself, as he was thought to be dead but was in fact not.

The Liberty's Kids Influence

I was a PBS Kid growing up. But while it's sometimes treated like the channel you'd watch because you didn't have access to Nickelodeon or Disney Channel, or the channel your grandma would put on for you, I was a PBS Kid by choice.

And no 2000s show had my attention in the chokehold that Liberty's Kids did. I was obsessed with it (and one of these days, I am going to make the Sarah cosplay of my childhood dreams). I have a blog post going more in-depth if you're unfamiliar with the show, which you can read here, but for a simpler recap, Liberty's Kids is set during the Revolution and follows British girl Sarah, American boy James, and French boy Henri as they report on significant events for Benjamin Franklin's newspaper—and it was undoubtedly one of the things that made me fall in love with historical fiction at a young age.

It's even inspired one of my novels!

There is a scene in which James is nearly impressed—and not in the sense that he's in awe about something. Rather, he's nearly caught up in an impressment gang, or press gang. Essentially, it was recruitment into the British Navy by force.

It's scaled down for Liberty's Kids viewers, but it sent me down the rabbit hole and let to the basis of Michael's story.

I keep going back and forth on the title for this next WIP, as it's a little less vague than others but not concrete, but here's what what I do know: Michael was taken in by a press gang as he was getting his younger brother away from the scene, and he was later one of a dozen men taken by the enemy in battle. He does make it out, though not unscathed.

There's still plenty of research and plotting to be done, but the concept is very much influenced by that one Liberty's Kids scene, just as the show influenced my writing path.

Breamport And Sailfest

I grew up in New London, CT, and it's been a source of inspiration for my current WIP A Tided Love—along with York, ME where I vacationed this past October and other seaside areas. Set in the fictional coastal resort town of Breamport, A Tided Love is a second-chance romance about a widow and the man she met on a summer holiday nearly a decade before.

One of the things New London is known for is Sailfest, which took place every summer for the past 45 years before being cancelled ahead of its 2025 season due to budgetary limitations.

Sailfest hosted an array of entertainment, food trucks and vendors, and rides, featuring a fireworks display over the river on the Saturday of that weekend.

Although I never got to attend the event in person, I have childhood memories of walking down the street to watch the fireworks from the view of a yard in the neighborhood; it was a huge event on the block with a radio tuned to the station airing the accompanying music and at one point vendors walking around with light-up toys and balloons for sale. The trees got taller and eventually blocked the view of the show save for the finale, but we still made the trek.

It's these fireworks that inspired the end of A Tided Love, at a festival inspired by Sailfest.

At the time of writing, I haven't decided on a name for this Sailfest parallel, but I can say recent events have given me some inspiration to base a new story around trying to save Breamport's equivalent.

Caroline's Love Of Strawberries

I've had a weird experience with Covid-19 (long-Covid specifically).

Two and a half years later, give or take, I'm significantly better than I'd been, but there are still quite a few symptoms that pop in varying degrees. Taste and smell were some of the worst-impacted for me, as I lost both for about a year and am gradually getting them back.

Strawberries were one of the first scents I got back. I wasn't a huge strawberry fan prior to Covid. But when it was one of maybe five things I could smell, it was my go-to flavor for everything.

Caroline loves baking, and while I wouldn't say her love of strawberries was a deliberate choice because of my actually being able to taste it when I started drafting A Tided Love, it may have been a subconscious choice.

Daniel's Profession

If you've been keeping up with my writing journey, you might see the name Daniel and be wondering, "Hold on, who's he, again?"

And that's because he's the protagonist of a story I haven't actually started writing yet. It's one of those vague-ish ideas I alluded to at the top of the post.

Daniel is an architect.

I attended a technical high school and was enrolled in the Computer-Aided Drafting and Mechanical Design program. And if you're wondering, no, I didn't pursue a career in that field. It ultimately wasn't for me. I was curious about technical writing but we never got to do that unit due to staffing changes and other factors.

That's not to say my drafting knowledge hasn't come in handy. For one thing, it's been helpful when mapping out crafting projects like cosplays and floor plans of the country manor houses my characters frequent.

But I think the real test will be when I finally begin work on Daniel's story. He may not be working in AutoCAD, but I imagine a lot of the foundational rules apply (but I haven't gone into the research for this story idea yet so that assumption could be totally off).

Plus one of the Drafting guys did jot "Write a book about us" in my senior yearbook so there may be a subtle nod or two their way... Who knows?

The Elephant In The Room

If you've been following me for a while, you may have seen me talk about including themes of death and grief in my romance novels. It comes up in nearly all of my stories, whether it's the loss of Eve's brother in Bound to the Heart, or the death of Caroline's husband and her pregnancy loss prior to the events of A Tided Love.

Grief is as much a part of life as love is, and as any other emotion is. It's part of what makes us human. It's universal, yet something that isn't always talked about in romance.

I lost my father unexpectedly when I was eighteen. The specifics are something I haven't gotten into on the blog, in part because I'm not ready to be that vulnerable online yet.

Looking back, I didn't have the resources that would have helped me process that grief. Partially because I wasn't ready for them, and partially because they weren't always available to me. A lot of what I did find was heavy-handed and preachy and unrealistic. I was a teenager in her first semester of college in a different state, trying to navigate the complexity of grief along with everything else, in circumstances where there were either platitudes or an unspoken expectation that I'd keep my head down and get over it, when I craved compassion and understanding.

It's the latter I hope I can provide my readers.

Readers turn to fiction as a means of escape and adventure. But for just as many, it's in search of solace and a need to find themselves again even if they don't have the words to pinpoint what they need.

As much as we're told to separate art from the artist, I find it's difficult to not include personal experiences and qualities of myself in my writing—be it traits I possess, wish I did, or wish I didn't.

These are only a few examples, there are countless nooks and crannies you'll find me hiding in my stories. And there are likely some that even I'm not aware of. Though not always deliberate, they're there.

But more importantly than hiding myself in my stories is allowing readers to find themselves as they're getting lost in them.

Thanks again to Monique for the suggestion! If YOU have a question or topic you'd like to see me cover in a future blog post, it only takes a moment to let me know. Head over to the Q&A Submissions tab and keep an eye on my social media pages!