From Personal Experience to Pages: Mining Story Ideas From Your Own Life

Whether it’s family curses or someone Photoshopping a college acceptance letter to their dream college, my books tend to have a hint of the supernatural or unbelievable. Underneath those stories are layers of my own experience, family anecdotes, saved articles, and thoughtful conversations with friends (though, to my knowledge, all of us did get into the colleges that we said we did). 

(3 Tips for Writing a Friendship Breakup.)

That Dutch crumb apple pie in The Takeout? At the start of the pandemic lockdown, the only thing I wanted was a Dutch crumb apple pie from a local bakery. The backyard calamansi trees in my latest middle grade, Thea and the Mischief Makers? Calamansi is a required pairing for that platter of pancit at Filipino parties, and we’ve been known to send guests home with bags of the small orange citrus too.

Taking a step further beyond the small details, our own lives are ripe with ideas for fiction. Not sure where to start in your own search for inspiration or how to build it out into a larger, book-worthy idea? Here are a few questions that I use to help kick off the quest.

What keeps drawing you—and others—in?

How many times have you experienced something or told—or even heard—a story over dinner that made you pause and think to yourself how great of a book that idea would make? Tuck away even the smallest ideas for later. Stories, like seeds, need time to grow.

With Thea, I always found it fascinating to see relatives ask permission from spirits in nature before we plucked fruit and flowers or passed places rumored to be touched by the otherworldly. At a family lunch the other day, we couldn’t kick off the meal without preparing atang–a plate for ancestral spirits around us. 

Because I write middle grade with a touch of fantasy, I often talk during school and library visits about how little bits of magic like these show up in my life. What’s amazing to me is when this somehow unlocks memories for readers and listeners who then share their own superstitions in return.

What started as a simple illustration of everyday magic—cautiously picking fruit from my backyard calamansi tree—snowballed into a book about the kind of goblins that pop up in folklore all over the world, under different names.

What have you struggled with?

Dealing with the fallout of a friendship, facing the final video game boss, doing your own taxes for the first time—the frustration and fear of looming defeat are common threads no matter the problem we’re trying to tackle.

Part of what inspired Thea was seeing my young daughter enter new spaces for the first time. She was an eager, playful student and fun-loving friend at her daycare. But then it was time to enter the big kids’ classroom, and the person she’d been before might not translate quickly or as well to this unfamiliar environment. 

It’s the same worry a lot of us have when starting a new job or trying to join new groups and activities as adults. The anxiety and lack of a clearcut, universal solution led to the core of this latest middle grade book, in which an all-star athlete kid finds herself suddenly being bad at something.

What frustrates you? What do you clash up against again and again?

What would you have done differently?

Mulling over all those “What if?” moments is a recipe for a sleepless night but may also lead you to a story idea or two. Think about the last time you argued with someone, and you only thought of a perfect, cutting response long after the conversation had ended. I bet you’ve already imagined the withered look on the person’s face, the glorious feeling of triumph, the walking away with your head held righteously high.

I wrote a young adult novel about a friendship breakup that didn’t center around one huge blow-up fight. It instead followed the relationship’s slow crumbling, the tiny cuts of quiet slights and poor decisions over months. Each of these cuts would have been “what if?” moments for my characters. What if they had just sent that text message checking up on their friend? What if they’d put up more of a fight to keep the relationship?

Jot down a few events in your life that could have wildly changed trajectories if you had been bolder, quieter, absent, or otherwise different, or maybe those times you heard a story or laughed at a TikTok that made you muse, “If only they’d done it this way….” Follow where that takes you.

Check out Tracy Badua’s Thea and the Mischief Makers here:

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Who would have seen that same scenario differently and why?

Try reimagining a situation from a different point of view. With the answers to the questions above in mind, whose point of view in those scenarios would be the most intriguing or pack the most emotional punch? Those former best friends I’d mentioned: How would the story be different from the points of view of the person who was supposed to receive an expected text and the person who never sent it?

In The Takeout, a town becomes home to a family-owned food truck and glitzy, celebrity restaurant both serving the same type of fusion cuisine. I chose to imagine this struggle from the point of view of the food truck owner’s daughter. As fun as it would have been to put myself in the designer shoes of famous twin chefs who founded luxury ice cream shops and burrito and Korean barbecue mashup joints, a new-to-town girl with lots to lose socially and personally made the story much more meaningful to young readers.

Similarly, in Thea, I could have written it from the perspective of an all-star athlete who not only excels at Brazilian jiu jitsu but at her American-Ninja-Warrior-inspired stunt camp as well. But would someone who is instantly good at everything be driven to the level of desperation that inadvertently incurs the wrath of the supernatural?

Sometimes, the right character will dictate to you how their story should go. Choose an event and pick at its plot and emotional threads from the perspective of all the characters involved.

I am unfortunately not one of those writers who is blessed with a plethora of ideas to choose from, so I find myself returning to the approaches listed above. I hope asking open-ended questions like these will help you unlock scenes or open up whole book-worthy doors too. 

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