At no time on my book tour did I jump up and down, wave my fists, and scream, “It’s a novel! That means fiction!”

At least I don’t think I did.

It’s hard to be sure, because, in my head, I had that tantrum about three times daily as I traveled from town to town in southern Michigan, reading, signing books, and attending the Ann Arbor Book Festival. You see, my novel, Flight, was set in that region, where I had lived during my high school and college years.

Full disclosure: The connections don’t end there. Flight is the story of an aging commercial pilot and his family as they face down their demons in the aftermath of 9/11, trying to find a way to move forward in an uncertain world. Like many first-time novelists, I wrote close to home. “Write what you know,” goes the conventional wisdom. I did. My fictional family, the Gruens, comprises parents and two daughters, as did the one I grew up in. The father, Will, is a TWA pilot, as my father was for thirty-five years. The mother, Carol, puts her own dreams on hold to do the best she can as a wife and mother, a choice my own mother made at times. And the elder daughter, Margaret, is a bossy overachiever who leaves her small Michigan town with a head full of lofty ambitions. Ahem.

There are differences, though. The Gruens live in one place for most of the daughters’ childhoods; my family moved incessantly. Will is an ex–Air Force officer and Vietnam veteran; my father was in the Air National Guard and never saw active service. Carol lacks my mother’s wacky sense of fun, Margaret’s bossiness is far more effective than my own, and, as for the younger daughter, she’s nothing like my sister. And the plot of the story—the family gathers for a wedding that may or may not happen—is completely contrived. My younger sister did get married. But the similarities end there.

As I traveled and talked to people, I found myself wanting to point out these differences. No one was having it.

“So your novel is about your father,” one bookstore manager told me. “Well, no,” I explained, “Will is a fictional character who shares some traits with my father.”

“C’mon, Ginger,” he chided. “We all read the newspaper article.” The local newspaper had run a feature pointing out some of the similarities between Flight and my life, and that was what people wanted to hear about. I began to sense a creeping frustration. Why were people so interested in the reality behind the fiction? Why weren’t they paying more attention to the craft of what I had done?

If you write memoir, your material—by which I mean recognizable features of your own life—is the core of your work. But even if you write fiction, you’re likely to find yourself borrowing details, character traits, even whole stories from the real world. And when you do, you open up a can of worms; wriggly little facts start crawling all over your art. For some readers, identifying real-life precedents becomes a sport. And they will unearth connections you weren’t even aware of.

“You said that about your sister once,” my mother pointed out about a line in which I described my younger-sister character, Leanne, as eager to avoid confrontation. Well, yes, I guess I did. But many people avoid confrontation. My partner, Bob, is another. But that doesn’t make Leanne a portrait of my sister, Heidi, any more than she is a portrait of Bob, though I have observed both of them at times and learned things about that shared trait. Why is this so hard to make clear?

I know what you’re thinking: Get over it. And perhaps you’re right. Why should it bother me? I’m sure there are writers who use their life material without a second thought. But in every well-known case of a writer reticent about sharing personal details, or refusing to identify real-life models for characters, I get a whiff of what was then irking me. Don’t focus on me; focus on my work.

All writing, even memoir, is an act of imagination, a labor to make something new—not the aiming of a video camera. Every time someone zeroed in on a true-life correlative—real or imagined—a little voice inside my head whined: “But what about my creative effort? What about the art involved?”

Oh, for the glory days of the New Criticism, when John Crowe Ransom and Alan Tate declared the author irrelevant! A work of art, they proclaimed, had nothing to do with the outside world, no matter how many connections you think you see. It was complete and unified in itself, and the only relevant critical parameters were questions of its own internal consistency. Did Tennessee Williams have an invalid sister? Who cared! All that mattered was that The Glass Menagerie be a complete and powerful composition on its own terms. Williams could throw himself in the ocean for all the New Critics cared, and take his sister with him. Fantastic, to be that uninteresting!

“I’m nobody! Who are you?” Emily Dickinson nailed it when she envisioned herself as an absence. The sense of joy and freedom in that poem rings true to writers. We’re writers, after all, not actors. Many of us are introverts. While I don’t consider myself a social klutz, I am subject to attacks of extreme shyness, and, even in comfortable situations, I tend to be an observer, never quite losing myself in the moment for fear of missing something. All that observing energy, that quiet analysis, goes into what I write. So when push comes to shove, I think my writing is more interesting than I am. At least I hope it is.

Keats had a term for this: negative capability. He saw the writer’s ability to lose his own identity in the imagined experience of others as his distinguishing feature. “If a sparrow come before my window, I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel,” he wrote to a friend. His poem “The Poet” begins “Where’s the poet?” and proceeds to riff on the mutability, the uncentered absence at the heart of the true artist. He’s nobody all right, and as gleeful about it as Dickinson was. The poem is all. As one of my college English professors used to bellow when we responded to one of his questions with mute stares, “Don’t look at me! Look at the text!”

And so we gesture to our work, the fruit of our labors. I don’t always like the metaphor of book-as-child, but perhaps it can explain what I’m getting at. Once a book is out, sitting sprucely on the shelf, decked out in a new jacket and ready to greet the world, it’s all grown up. We want to see it go out on its own, meet people, have adventures, and live an independent existence. We don’t want it to have its life compared to ours at every point, or to seem successful only insofar as it looks like us. We, after all, have been reduced to a line of letters across the cover, just as, in a child, we’re merely a jumble of DNA on the genome.

As writers, we want to be so reduced. After all, would we choose to forego reality for long stretches of time, sitting in a study, hunched over a computer screen, while life seethes and rollicks away outside, if at heart we didn’t believe there was something better, something finer or deeper or truer about words on a page? Something that trumps reality, for all its belly-shaking, skin-crawling, spine-tingling tangibility?

There’s a deep issue here: the question of why we write. Even the most realistic writer doesn’t write merely to capture reality. We write to convey our perceptions, those ineffable, head-bound transactions between our finite consciousness and everything that roils outside it. We write because writing is the best substitute we have for a Vulcan mind-meld, for letting someone else join us inside our perceiving selves. It’s not simply that we want others to see the things we see—we want them to see things the way we see them, to feel them the way we feel them. It’s not about things being seen. It’s about our particular take on the way things are understood.

“Archimedes said that he could move the world if he had a point whereon to rest his machine,” wrote William Wordsworth. “Who has not felt the same aspirations as regards the world of his own mind?” To get outside of our own heads, to find the point from which to make our own consciousness an object of manipulation—not a prison-house for the soul but a thing to be shared—is the dream of writing, the dream, in the end, of all language.

And when it works, what glory! What wonder! What relief! And what terror, too, because, once someone joins you in your head, she may impose perceptions of her own, Being John Malkovich–style. But even that is exciting. Hearing someone detail for me what she thought was going to happen to my characters after the last page—even when it differed completely from my own ideas—has been the most enjoyable part of publishing a novel.

And in the end, this is how I got my head around readers’ inevitable tendency to connect the dots between fiction and reality. It’s an attempt to find mutuality, to get to that piece of common ground where all of us—the writer, the reader, the characters—occupy the same space. Perhaps it isn’t ignoring the art, after all. Perhaps it is just another road in.

Still, I don’t plan to have any pilots in my next book, and I won’t be setting it in Michigan. Maybe a state I’ve never set foot in—Ohio, perhaps.

Ginger Strand has written for the Believer and Harper’s, and is a regular contributor to the Books section of the Dominion Post in Wellington, New Zealand. Her novel, Flight, was published by Simon & Schuster in May.