Some Say To Write What You Know…

…others argue that imagination is good enough. After all, just because you haven’t strangled prostitutes and tossed them in a river doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be able to create a character who has.

Then you read a memoir like Running With Scissors by Augesten Burroughs.

Omigod. I know it’s cliché, but look up ‘dysfunctional family background’ in the dictionary, and I’ll lay odds this guy’s photo is there.

If you haven’t read the book, take a failed female poet with dubious mental faculties, stir in an absent alcoholic father, then mix it all up with a shrink who's crazier than everyone combined and throw poor Augesten into the middle, and what have you got?

A writer with unlimited fodder for stories that grip and entertain.

So, how’s a white bread WASP like myself supposed to compete?

Seriously, I could use some compassion here.

My parents are my best friends.
My inner child and I are on speaking terms.
I work in a family business and we all get along.
I asked for (and got) a horse for Christmas one year.

Yep. No doubt about it. My writing career is doomed.

Not that I’m complaining, mind you.