Drawing from Experience

So, as I previously mentioned, I like to retell stories. There's something that I find exhilarating about taking a true story and turning it into a shared memory "based on a true story." Whereas, creating a story from scratch may be the song, spinning a yarn is the remix. I like to exaggerate the emotions of my friends and enemies, gloss over the lulls and force people to the punchline before they can tell that they're laughing; create a world that may have existed and superimpose it over the one that certainly did. But, in order to retell stories, I need my source material.

I'm currently working on a book that I have tentatively labeled an LGBT YA fiction. It is more or less a hyper detailed look at the climax of two young boys' rite of passage into the gay world, i.e. "coming out." For inspiration, I'm reading "Will Grayson, Will Grayson," a collaborative work in the same or a similar genre by John Green and David Levithan which, after just the first few chapters, I have already started recommending to my gay and straight friends. For me, the characters in my book take on traits and perform actions that I have both experienced myself and have seen transpire around me. It's as therapeutic as it is artistic, to recreate the world that I wish I could have lived in, or at least the world that I would like to have people remember.

And with that, I write this to say that instead of punching my clock sitting at the laptop after work today, writing out another chapter for my text, I decided to take a field trip of sorts. On the whim of my friend (pictured), we decided to scoff at the notion of a weekday and hit up a new Japanese Karaoke Bar just put into Capitol Hill, Seattle. Just for fun. Just because.

We had just gotten done with a little girl chat over some cheap Asian Fusion (read: we don't know how else to incorporate hamburgers, Talapia and pho onto the same menu) and decided the night wasn't over yet. As we stumbled up towards a bar where regrettably we have become regulars, we noticed a swanky window displaying the tell tale swanky vertical wood paneling of a for sure swanky bar. We decided to ditch the usual and waltz in, not knowing what The Rock Box would contain.

Sure enough, it was a bar for drunk, loud, obnoxious, vain, people to sing like, yes, that song was about them. And that we did. At the top of our (recently recovered strep) throats, we were belting out Top 40 hits like it was no one's business (while simultaneously proving that it would never be our business). If those walls could talk, they probably would have been judging us.

Katy Perry? Yes. Rihanna? Yes. Natalia Imbruglia's Torn?... unfortunately...yes. It was like being a rock star, ON A MONDAY! We left, emboldened, sore, and with a new weapon in our arsenal against weekend monotony.

All of this to say that despite not making "progress" on my text tonight, I stumbled upon a McNugget of a story that I'm fully ready to chew on. I've already begun thinking of ways I could incorporate it, the bar, the Monday caprice, the horrible song selection, more fully, into a larger story.

What do you think? How do you best incorporate your own experiences into your works?