On Stealing from the Real World in Writing Fiction

Warning: this post contains spoilers to Little Birds and Other Small Magic. Read at your own discrection.

One of the most common questions I get about Little Birds and Other Small Magic is how much of the story and characters are based on events and people in real life. The answer: a lot. I stole more from the people and animals in my life than I’d usually steal for any novel that I was writing.

The thing is that I wasn’t ever intending to publish this novel–I was writing in a desperate attempt to understand how very lost I felt in my own life. And I think, in an odd way (and sorry if this is a spoiler), I was practicing what it might be like to lose my mom and still continue to live my life.

That practice paid off: while she was dying, I was able to read the first half of the story aloud to her. While I hope that she heard all of the boundless love that my story contained for her, in those moments, my past words were also a balm for myself: a reminder that I would survive her death, that our family could continue to grow and change even as we mourned her.

It was wild, in that moment, to recognize how closely I had captured the experience of sitting at someone’s deathbed. Somehow, while writing the story, I had managed to steal from my future as well as my past and present.

But this isn’t the part that most people are curious about: they want to know how much Theodore Primrose is like my husband, Jordan. They want to know which other characters are based on people from my life.

In order to respect my family’s privacy, unfortunately I can’t be too specific about who is based on who, and how they’re similar and different. But I will tell you that I stole impressions of my husband’s extended family as I wrote Mary–who is not at all based on me (I get this specific question a lot). I’m more like Grandma or maybe Delia–too opinionated and prone to whining but essentially trying to do the right thing in life. It’s probably more accurate to say that I’m like my mom, who Grandma is based on (though I stole my own Grandma’s name for her).

And Theo is 100% based on Jordan–in ways, the story is as much a love letter to Jordan as it is to my mom. I’ve been rereading it lately, because as I write the sequel (prequel? The story is set before, during and after Mary’s story), I have to cross reference Little Birds frequently. This reread is making me want to go back in time, to the days when we’d escape into the woods together for adventures.

Jordan is the oldest pastor’s son, like Theo is. And he’s also deviated from his family’s beliefs (like Theo). But he has a very different (and much more loving) relationship with his parents–and Pastor Primrose is basically the opposite of Jordan’s dad, who is very good in both the Christian way and Grandma’s way. Both Theo and Jordan own their mistakes, and take them very seriously.

But Theo and Jordan are very different too. Jordan has a very firm grip on his temper–and he’d never be reckless with a gun, even as a 21 year old. And Theo is a little less charming than Jordan–I can’t imagine Jordan ever becoming the town outcast, because he’s too social. But they both would like to disappear into the woods for weeks at a time on extended hunting trips.

Sparrow is a carbon copy of our dog, Wren, from the missing leg to the fox tail to the “roo roo!” — I’ve actually had a fun little tradition for myself of writing each of our pets into a novel. Our dog Chara is one of the stars in an earlier, unpublished novel that I wrote called Bottleneck. And Minerva, our incredibly mean but loyal cat, will be the animal star in my next novel. I guess Shrimpbone, our most recent addition, will have to star in another novel, as will the chickens (perhaps as a group).

But perhaps the thing I stole most from own life was the food and experiences of foraging for and growing it and eating it in community with friends and family. Jordan and I both love to eat–and sometimes that’s eating various varieties of boxed ramen–but mostly it’s eating food that comes from sources that are as local as possible (ideally, meat that he’s hunted and vegetables that we’ve grown).

When I was in college, we used to go foraging for morels and sorrel and dandelion greens. I remember one notable occasion when we made pizza from scratch, and adorned it with dandelion greens and morels that we’d gathered. We’ve also participated in milk shares–with our very own Rosie (we pasteurized our milk at home–brucellosis scares me).

Over the years, we’ve experimented with making many different food items from scratch–homemade pasta, tortillas, sourdough bread, pickles, dumplings, jam, you name it. Pre-kids, we made most of our flour-based products from scratch. That’s shifted as we’ve had kids and gotten busier, but I still bake a weekly batch of sourdough bread and we recently tried making butter for the first time (it was SO easy and SO delicious).

I also drew food ideas liberally from our extended family, who are incredible chefs themselves–for example, after my sister-in-law told me about picking wild grapes from a vine outside her house and making jam, I added a scene to the story during post-editing with exactly her recipe, as an ode to her amazing jam (it was SO good). She also developed a jelly donut recipe that is absolutely incredible specifically for the story–and that I hopefully will find a good way to share one of the these days, perhaps alongside the jam recipe.

I will say that as far as strategy goes, stealing liberally from my life added depth, nuance and consistency to my story. They say to write what you know, and that adage certainly held true for me. It was easy to add rich detail when I had a person to base the detail on, and if you can imagine what a specific person would say or do in a situation, it’s easier to write believable dialogue and ensure that they’re making logical decisions.

In fact, in one of the parts where I deviated most from what Jordan would do in writing Theo’s story, I got the most criticism from readers–Theo disappears for a couple of weeks before he proposes, right as Mary is in the thick of mourning. My readers didn’t buy it, and frankly, neither did I.

I was attempting to play on Theo (and Jordan’s) sense of perfectionism–my thought was that before Theo was ready to invite someone else into his life, he felt like it had to be perfect, and so he’d stepped away to get his affairs in order before he asked. But in reality, Theo (and Jordan) would never allow a friend to suffer during such a hard period just because of their own sense of perfectionism.

We kept that scene (even with feedback from our beta readers) because I felt we needed it for the pacing and plot arc–the story needed a little bit more suspense before Mary got her happy ending, and I didn’t want to rush Mary into a love scene while she was still so fresh and raw from mourning Grandma. But I probably could’ve found a more believable way to orchestrate that.

Ultimately though, I’d recommend that maybe you mix up the details a bit more than I did if you’re intending to publish. Maybe steal someone’s personality, but give them an entirely different outer shell. Or steal one or two of their characteristics–their mole or the hair that grows out of the underside of their chin (I have one, it’s lucky) or their bunions. Steal the things that writers always forget about when crafting stories, imbue it with a healthy dose of fiction, and it will make your world all the richer.

But be careful to make sure that the people you’re stealing from don’t feel like their lives are being appropriated in the name of your craft. My family is incredibly kind and gracious, and has been so lovely about my pillaging of their traits, but not everyone is so lucky. And I wish that I hadn’t put them in the position to need to be gracious in the first place–I would’ve stolen much more strategically (more like a pick pocket, and less like a bank robber), if I’d known it’d be available to the whole wide world to read.

I would’ve made people less recognizable during the editing process–but by then I was hopelessly in love with who my characters had become–they’d sprung to life as their own, distinct people on my page, taking on their own characteristics and opinions, and I couldn’t bring myself to change them. Because ultimately, regardless of the inspiration, it is impossible to capture the whole of a real person on a page. Each of my loved ones is multifaceted and complex, and capable of change.

My characters started out as shadows of the people they were based on, but then the magic of the story began to work on them–and by the end of it, they were complex and imperfect and wholly their own. Even Sparrow, who I tried to copy directly from our dog Wren, became her own character (Sparrow never has accidents in the house, and Wren is terrified of loud sounds, and would never be able to go out on hunting trips. Wren is also not nearly as smart or tuned in as Sparrow).

So yes: my story is based on real people and foods and adventures. But also no: it is wholly a work of fiction. I hope this satisfies your curiosity, and gives you some food for thought when it comes to your own writing!