Do you ever wonder how much you’re giving away of yourself when you write? Details of a writer’s psyche must show through, since all we really have to draw from are our experiences and our emotions. Our backgrounds: our genetics, our nature and how we were nurtured as children make up who we are, and are inherent in everything we do. Whether a writer of fiction, personal accounts, poetry… what creates our literary “voices” is our individuality.

I worry–not as much now as I used to–how much personal information I’m putting out there, whether intentionally or not. I worry that my kids will read what I write and be embarrassed or scarred – who wants to read their mother’s love scenes after all? How do they know how much of it comes from my imagination and how much from experience? I certainly won’t hand my own mother my novel and say, here, enjoy it. But then she judges me more harshly than anyone on the planet.

Of course, not everything we write comes from experience. I often say that if Stephen King did, he’d long be imprisoned. It’s not as though he goes around killing people, or feels the pain of being hit by a car. … oh wait, never mind. I watched a Youtube video the other day, in which he spoke to a room full of students about his process in writing, among other things. He said that one of the questions he is asked most often is what his childhood was like – what kind of trauma he went through in order to write the things he does. He said there was absolutely nothing… but if there was, he wouldn’t tell.

For myself, I went through an obsession with death after my father passed away suddenly. Not surprising since I was only fourteen years old. Is it why I write horror on occasion? I’m not sure. It was certainly the only traumatic thing I went through as a child. Yet paternal abandonment, in whatever form, shows up in every major work I’ve written to date. It took four novels before I realised it.

This is what I am open about. What about the stuff I’d rather not be? I ask again: do you ever wonder how much of yourself you’re giving away when you write? Is there anyone in your life you’d rather never read your work – or are you careful just in case they do?

Illustrated in light erotica, on my fiction blog here: http://lindaghillfiction.wordpress.com/2014/04/17/o-is-for-oh-jupiter/