In our Craft Capsule series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 240.
Early readers of my soon-to-be-published debut novel, Restitution (Regal House Publishing, 2025), have all asked me the same question: How autobiographical is it? After all, like me, the narrator is a woman who grew up in Central Illinois with a German mother. There are many answers to this question. The clearest one is that the story takes place in locations I know and love but is definitely not the story of my family.
Still, this didn’t stop me from using scenes from my life as fodder when I first started writing. Aren’t we told to write what we know? Turning to familiar childhood moments was an easy way out whenever I felt stuck or didn’t know what should come next, because I knew how those scenes began and ended. Why not have the brother and sister in my novel reenact the day my brother climbed into our neighbor’s yard to reclaim a ball he had tossed over the fence? Replace the neighbor’s vicious dog with some kicking goats, the simple rubber ball with a soccer ball, and voilà, I had the makings of a sibling memory.
Familiar scenes like this were scattered throughout my first draft, but then something remarkable happened. I finally understood what writers meant when they spoke about their characters as if they had a life of their own. Every choice I made about my characters shaped the next choice and so on, until they became fully fleshed out people whom I could no longer mold entirely as I wished, at least not if I wanted to keep them consistent and believable. Instead, my characters had to react like themselves—not like me, not like the people around me—even in those scenes I had stolen from my life. With each unexpected reaction, they taught me something new and became even more defined. What started as a byproduct of getting stuck and looking for a shortcut became one of my favorite characterization tools. First, throw my characters into a scene from my own life. Then, see what they do and learn from it.
As I was completing my final revisions, I noticed a fascinating pattern. Almost all the scenes I’d taken directly from my life had landed on the cutting-room floor (and those few scenes that survived were so changed as to be unrecognizable). The scenes I’d invented, on the other hand, remained. Why? Because the scenes from my life felt forced upon my characters, whereas the scenes I had invented came to life with and because of them.
Letting my characters play in my life was a little like an experiment in a high school chemistry class. The liquid in the Bunsen burner bubbled, or turned pink, or sent steam puffs to the ceiling; my classmates and I ooohed and aaahed; later, we reflected on what we had learned. Then we disposed of the liquid (safely). While I was drafting my novel, using real life as an experiment was a surefire way to have fun, be surprised, add joy, and come away with characters that felt distinctive and wonderfully different from anyone I know. I highly recommend letting your characters run free through your memories and shape their own stories in the process.
Tamar Shapiro’s debut novel, Restitution, is being released in September 2025 by Regal House Publishing. A former housing attorney and nonprofit leader, she is currently an MFA candidate in fiction at Randolph College.
image credit: Hans Reniers