Guest Blogging at Beth Hoffman’s Place

Beth Hoffman honored me here at her Blog, in her Brava spotlight.

I have copied it here in its entirety.

Here are her introductory moments, followed by what I wrote.

Laurel-Rain Snow is someone I would love to have as a neighbor. She’s talented, generous, and very, very wise–you can see that in her lovely eyes. She’s also genuine. When she retired from social work where she specialized in child welfare cases for thirty years, the old dream of writing was soon ignited. Drawing from her vast experiences, Laurel-Rain is an expert at creating characters and detailing their behaviors, inner thoughts and motives in her novels.

Through a chance meeting via social media, I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know Laurel-Rain and I’m delighted that she accepted my invitation to be featured on Brava. So please give her a warm welcome!

Real Life Experiences

When I look back on my life—and these days, there is much more time behind me than ahead of me!—I ask myself certain questions about how I came to this point in my life.  What were the defining moments for me?

On a couple of my Internet sites, such as Authors Den, I posted a little snippet about myself, and it goes like this:  “I feel like I’ve lived about five different lives…and you can read about them in my five novels.”

Perhaps this sounds glib, but in many ways, it seems to summarize the passages of my life.

As a child, I lived on a farm with very traditional, strict parents.  Any free time I had was something I had to steal after all the chores were done.  And if, for a few moments, I escaped the scrutiny of my controlling father, I felt very lucky indeed.  My greatest passion was reading, followed soon by my “scribblings.”  Like Jo March, in “Little Women,” I turned to my writing as an outlet…and a hope for the future.

Some of these childhood, adolescent, and young adult experiences became the fictionalized core of my novel “Web of Tyranny.”

My college (radical) exploits formed much of “Miles to Go.”

“An Accidental Life” spotlighted events from my social work career, zeroing in on the struggles of young pregnant teens on drugs; these characters were fictionalized, but the events of their lives were very real…torn from the pages of case files and changed substantially to protect the privacy of the clients.

Therefore, in many ways, I did live the experiences described in my novels.  Even the ones I am now writing.  Currently working on two WIPs, I have chosen to move the time period ahead to the present in one that I am calling “Defining Moments.”  In this work of fiction, I am featuring an English teacher who dreams of becoming a writer: something she does achieve once she reaches retirement.  My experiences were similar, except that my primary career was in social work.  My Main Character in “Defining Moments” had a very different childhood from mine, and in most ways, is unlike any of my incarnations—except for the writing part.  And the fact that she becomes an obsessive blogger.

I chose to incorporate that particular “addiction” of mine into the story because it felt like something authentic that a writer could and would do.  My character began to blog and network as a way to market her books.  In the end, she lost herself in the process because of her complete immersion into this world of detached social connections that she found on blogs and social networking sites.  Finding her way back is a struggle, but in the journey she discovers some important clues about who she is.

I believe that, in “writing what we know,” we do sometimes borrow from our life experiences.  Perhaps the insights we have gleaned can be offered to our characters.  Or our struggles can become theirs.  Through these expressions of our “real life experiences,” we can hopefully connect to readers.