In my online writing group, the Writing Wombats, we talk about various aspects of writing and sometimes get into chats about various aspects of craft and creativity.
In a recent thread, we discussed the topic of how your experiences show up in your writing. I'm currently writing my second novel and have written numerous short stories, so I've had lots of chances to play around with my basket of experiences and continue the exploration in my fiction.
I write what I know, but often veer into extrapolations that take my characters into situations where they make different choices than I would, which is a lot of the fun of it. I have traveled to a lot of different countries, cities and other locations, and like to use these locations in my writing. I also like to take an experience I have had and then do "what-ifs" to explore those roads not taken.
Engineers generally know that they can't reliably take data from one context and extrapolate to prove a totally different context; but for novelists, those context shifts are fair game as you build a world for your characters to play in.
My first novel, Growing Up Single, was set in locales which included New England, where I grew up, New York, Paris, the Riviera and several cities in Canada. The settings in my second novel are even more diverse and include stops in Asia, other parts of Europe and the Middle East. But a setting is just the beginning. It offers a canvas upon which a story can unfold.
If you are a writer, do you mostly rely on your own experiences to shape your fiction or is this foundation really more of a jumping off point to fuel stories that go beyond your experience?
If you are a reader, can you tell when the writer has really experienced the place or kinds of events that are depicted? Or would you prefer to be brought into a very different world that takes you away from those touch points with day to day life?