Nahno McLein

Yeah, embarrassing, isn't it.
I just read a short story that I was working on over a year ago. It is a very personal story, one that I don't even know whether I can ever give it to the person that is involved. On the other hand, it's a really good story.

I was wondering how you cope with using material about your personal experience. People you know become characters (even though they will be different). In my first book, I used practically my whole environment. Parents and friends said they could clearly see themselves in it. Back then I didn't really think about what they thought of my depiction. That has changed.

If you witness something really funny happening, would you use it in your writing, even though the person that it happened to might read it someday? After all, you do use different names.

Jack brought his glass from the kitchen into the living room and squeezed through the space between two chairs to sit down on his seat. He took a sip from his glass, his fifth coke that evening, and leaned forward to place it on the table. Thinking, he held on in midair and decided to keep it in his hands. He’d probably take another sip any minute. There wasn’t much else he could do.

Family meetings were always quite hard. He had wondered so often why that is, but his mind wouldn’t come up with a plausible answer. Was it because he had a boring family? He actually didn’t think so. In fact, he looked forward to seeing his family whenever they haven’t done so in a while. When they all met, his parents, his aunts, his cousins, his grand-aunts and their children and last but not least his grandma, he enjoyed their company for a bit; they were funny, had interesting topics and never really sat in silence.
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