I very much enjoyed your piece on “Is Our Fiction Autographical?”– especially since it made similar cultural references to those in my recent Indie novel, “The Duke Don’t Dance,” a tale of my so-called “silent generation.”

Of course, any novel is autographical in the sense of drawing on one’s own experiences as a narrator/observer and (to an often lesser extent) as one or more the protagonists. (In “Duke,” I’d say about 40-50% of my personality resides in each of the male protagonists; 10-20% of the female protagonists.)

I don’t think, however, that it is the writer’s obligation to fully bare his or her own soul through one or all of the characters. After all, we don’t know exactly what secrets Bobby McGee shared… and probably they were different secrets depending on whether the singer was Gordon Lightfoot or Janis Joplin. One of the challenges of my own writing was how much of each protagonist to leave unresolved. While I write as a third person narrator, my perspective is not really omniscient but shifts among the protagonists’in-the-moment views and emotions as the story evolves. The novel cannot provide a complete autobiography of any of the characters and, in my view, should not. Ahter all, the human experience is full of incomplete understanding. The best fiction writing, in my view, does not impose the author’s views and allows the reader to figure out much for herself or himself — including what that elusive writer is all about!

You should have an interesting workshop in Charlotte. I don’t think I’m able to participate, but congratulations on a good topic.

Richard Sharp