I sometimes wonder as I’m reading a book how much of the story was drawn from the author’s life. If the story has a snarky mother-in-law, did reality inspire the author? Probably not, if those dedications and acknowledgements hold any truth. You know the ones. They go something like this, “Even though the main character in this book lives next-door to the neighbors from hell, my neighbors are the nicest people on earth!”

Riiiiiight!!!

For me it’s often hard to remember the starting point for each facet of a book. I get ideas from everything—the people that I meet, the places I visit, the work I do, the newspaper articles I read. Everything.

If I start off with an idea or characteristic drawn from real life, those details usually mutate into something unique to the book as I write. When I wrote the synopsis for Getting Away, I had a character who was definitely on the wrong side of the law. He stayed that way until about half way though the first draft when I realized he was a good guy masquerading as a bad guy, which made the story so much more interesting.

Since I write about a family with kids there is some crossover between my real life and the fiction I write, which tends to come out in the parenting and motherhood themes in my books. Rarely do I take an incident and repeat it verbatim in a book. Instead, I try to think back to what it was like when my kids were younger and recapture the feelings I had then—how repetitive the daily routine was at times (the laundry never ends!), the joy of naptime, and the anxiety I felt about raising my kids. My goal is to distill those emotions into a few incidents that show character and keep the plot moving.

There are certain things that are totally off limits. The other day a funny incident occurred in our family that would make wonderful blog material. But I’m not going to write about it because it would embarrass one family member. I won’t fictionalize it and put it in a book either. Keeping things private is almost a foreign concept in today’s tell-all, expose-all world. We have people taking lie detector tests on TV, exposing themselves and their families to pain. And then there’s countless people making fools of themselves on other shows, just for a few minutes in the limelight.

So what about you? Where’s the line between your real life and fiction? How much of your daily life goes into your writing? Are there topics you won’t write about?