These are questions I have been asked even before publication of Absolution. And I expect more such questions as people read the novel. That’s because readers often expect a novel to mirror the writer’s life. But what occurs in the creation of fiction is far more complex and mysterious than writing autobiography. I call it “fictional alchemy.” You probably know that alchemy was the process by which medieval scientists and sorcerers tried to transform ordinary metals into gold. Well, writers of fiction are like that too. We try to transform the elemental stuff of our lives into stories – stories about people who often aren’t at all like us.

The old adage “write what you know” is the most obvious of truisms for novelists. For how can we possibly write what we don’t know? A novel grows out of every experience I have ever had, every book I have ever read, every person I have ever known, every iota of information I have ever unearthed through research. Those are the elements of my life that are transformed through the creative process into fictional lives and places.

Here’s how this works. For example, was my husband in Vietnam? No. Have I ever been to Vietnam? No. But I have known people who served there. I have talked with veterans of Vietnam and veterans of other wars. I have read accounts of soldiers in books and on the web. Do you know what amazing treasures can be found on the Internet? I discovered an entire set of U.S. military maps used in the Vietnam War. And through GPS sites, I can sit at my desk in North Carolina and actually look at the present-day terrain of Vietnam’s Central Highlands!

But what about Maggie’s story? Is that my story? Not even close, although I drew on personal experiences as I developed her character. I too came of age in the 1960’s. I too came to oppose the war when I was a student. The sum total of my anti-war activism, however, was participating in the 1968 October Moratorium Against the War on the University of South Carolina campus. I helped circulate a petition against the war and sat up all night with other students while the names of the war dead were read. I sang “Give Peace a Chance.” You can see that I was not a very active activist. My awareness of the Vietnam War and the anti-war movement in those days came to me as it came to most Americans – through newspapers and TV.

Finally, have I ever lived in New York City? Yes, I have. I lived there for two years in the early 1970’s, just after the events I describe in the novel – the Wall Street anti-war rally and the attack on the protestors – events that actually occurred following the Kent State shootings. Oddly enough, when I lived in New York, I knew nothing about that rally. I learned about it many years later in my research for this novel.

But there is one thing in Absolution that is taken directly from my life in New York – that squalid apartment where Maggie and Baird lived. I rented that apartment for a year! And although an anti-war activist lived just down the hall, my apartment was home only to me and three cats. But in the alchemy of fiction, I am able to do anything I want with that apartment. I can put Maggie and Baird there or a serial killer or a poet or a family of Puerto Ricans. That’s how the creative imagination works.

So the next time you read a novel and wonder about the influence of a writer’s life on the story and characters, remember this: the stories writers create are certainly shaped by their experiences and knowledge. But the bottom line is this: novelists love to make things up!