As I handed over a copy of my latest novel, Tied to You, to a friend last week she asked me the question that seems to come with the territory of writing erotic romance:
“So how much of this is about you?”
I was quick to reassure her that it was all fiction, a product of a very overactive imagination, but I have to confess that I was telling a little white lie. Because at the end of the day, no matter how much of a story comes from our imagination, there are always elements of ourselves imbedded into the narrative.
The reason for the white lie then? Well, I am sure my nearest and dearest don’t really want me to admit to what I get up to in the bedroom with the Hubby, even if he is always happy to participate in a little ‘research’, and most importantly of all there are simply things that I like to keep private.
No matter how much I keep to myself though, I do find it seeping into my writing. When I wrote my first novel, Thirty Days Have September, I was feeling adrift following a sudden move from Australia back to the UK. While I might have been pretending to everyone in my ‘real’ life that everything was okay, my main character’s depression and feelings of abandonment very much echoed how I was feeling at the time. I never I intended to write it that way, but as the words flowed out of me it seemed like so many things from my subconscious found its way into the story.
While I am very upfront about who I am as a person and the fact that I write what I write, I am still careful about how I am perceived, hence the need for some ‘creative’ truths. So when people ask me that question I am quick to tell them how marvellous Google is. I might be avoiding the truth but at the end of the day we are all entitled to a few secrets.
