ROBIN BLACK: I do use places where I've been. I will use settings that I've traveled to, sometimes just because they're interesting. They're fresh to me. They get me thinking about new stories. I'm not one of these writers who will use an episode from my own life directly in a story. What I will do instead is if something seems kind of interesting or just intrigues me in my own life, I might use a part of it or I might transform it in some way because I know there are authors who can just say like, I'm going to write about me and I'm going to make it fiction. For me, that's never been successful.
So an example of my doing that, I have a child who's now actually 20 with expressive language disabilities. And when she was young, I had to finish all her sentences for her and I had to supply the words she was thinking of. And I thought that was kind of a fascinating, different take on mothering, for me, that I had to be in her head all the time, and the potentials for that being either healthy or unhealthy.
And I wanted to write a story that involved that, but I didn't want it to be a mother-and-child because it felt too much like my own life. So the story that came out of that ended up actually being about 65-year-old twins, and the brother has very similar speech issues to my daughter's. And so it was a way for me to work through what I found fascinating about it, without it trailing into being autobiography.