Using Real Life in Fiction

As writers, we often mine our lives for bits and pieces we can incorporate into our stories, from setting them in places where we have lived to basing murder victims on despised employers. Sometimes, though, our lives provide much more than incidental inspiration.

I’ve had two stories published this year that draw heavily on events and experiences from my youth, and both were written in response to convention anthology calls for submission.

“GLASS BEACH”

Work on the first story—“Glass Beach,” published in the January/February 2026 issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine—began when I read Bouchercon 2020’s call for submissions for California Schemin’, in which each story has a California theme.

I spent a great deal of my childhood and teen years in California and, when no story ideas sprang immediately to mind, my wife suggested I write about my childhood. So, I wrote a paragraph about how my stepfather spent his free time:

Glass Beach, abutting MacKerricher State Park near Fort Bragg, California, is a tourist attraction visited by tens of thousands of people each year, but it wasn’t always. It started life more than a century ago as the town dump, and, in the early 1970s, not long after the dump officially closed, my stepfather played a key role in transforming it into the attraction it became. He spent weekends combing the beach for scrap metal and sorting what he found into cardboard boxes kept in the trunk of his 1966 Chrysler New Yorker.

This is true, and this paragraph became the opening paragraph of the story. Later, I added the second paragraph, and this is where a true story about my teen years starts being fictionalized:

The extra money my stepfather earned selling the scrap metal allowed us to eat a little better and dress a little better as he struggled to pay off my mother’s medical and funeral bills. I was a teenager then, plodding my way through high school, and I had no appreciation for all that he did. A stocky ex-Marine thirteen years older than my mother—thirty-three years older than me—he belonged to a generation I neither comprehended nor respected, and it was clear he felt the same about mine.

Though my mother died during my senior year of high school and I lived with my stepfather for several months after her death, “Glass Beach” begins the summer before the protagonist’s senior year, his mother having passed away during his junior year. But the relative ages of the characters match that of me, my mother, and my stepfather, and my stepfather was a “stocky ex-Marine.”

And there the story sat until well past the deadline for California Schemin’. I had a beginning, but I had no story until one day I decided the protagonist and his stepfather uncover something at the dump that ties into a long-ago crime. The two of them—along with the protagonist’s best friend and his best friend’s widowed mother—must deal with the consequences of that discovery.

Throughout the rest of the story, I write about Fort Bragg, California, and my high school years as filtered both through a memory that may have grown foggy with age and the need to create a compelling piece of fiction.

When I finally finished the story, I had missed the anthology deadline by more than a year. I ultimately placed “Glass Beach”—after revising the end based on suggestions from Linda Landrigan—with Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine.

“UNDER THE PROCTOR STREET BRIDGE”

Work on the second story—“Under the Proctor Street Bridge,” published in Time After Time (Thalia Press), March 2026—began after I read the call for submissions for Left Coast Crime’s 2024 anthology A Killing Rain, which was to include stories set in and around Puget Sound.

I lived in Tacoma, Washington, beginning the summer before sixth grade and continuing until part way through ninth grade. I returned after my mother’s death to live with my grandparents for a year before moving to Illinois.

So, I again wrote about my childhood. Similar to how I began “Glass Beach,” I placed the events in a historical perspective:

There is so much I know now that I didn’t understand during the summer of 1971. I was thirteen then, soon to start ninth grade at Mason Junior High School, and I spent most days with Tommy O’Connor, the third of seven children—and the only boy—living in a three-bedroom house across the street from the home I shared with my widowed father. The Vietnam War was winding down, Richard Nixon was running for re-election, and many teenaged veterans were more than a year away from voting in their first presidential election following the July passage of the 26th Amendment.

I didn’t pay much attention to the news, and Tommy’s mother wouldn’t let him and his sisters watch it for fear they might learn what their father was doing halfway around the world and why people spit on him and other soldiers when they returned home.

Like the protagonist narrating the story, I was thirteen in 1971 and soon to start ninth grade at Mason Junior High School. One of my friends lived across the street with six siblings (though not all girls as in the story), and his father served in Vietnam.

So, the first two paragraphs are mostly true and truth is mixed with fiction throughout the rest of the story. For example, I often found bicycle parts under the Proctor Street Bridge, and I built Frankenstein bicycles from them. But bicycle parts aren’t the only things the protagonist and his friend find under the bridge.

(Only years later did I realize that the parts I found likely came from stolen bicycles, which helped inform “Under the Proctor Street Bridge.”)

This time, I finished the story before the anthology’s submission deadline, but it didn’t make the cut. It did, however, meet the needs of Time After Time, an anthology of mysterious tales inspired by history.

OTHER EXPERIENCES

Other stories mine my experiences—the Morris Ronald Boyette private eye stories, for example, take place in Waco, and many of the settings are real or fictionalized versions of real places—but no stories draw as much from my life as do “Glass Beach” and “Under the Proctor Street Bridge.”

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Boots, BBQ, and Bloodshed, which I edited for Sisters in Crime North Dallas, releases July 1.

Scattered, Smothered, Covered, and Chunked gets new life in a July 1 rerelease by Audecyn Books.