It's called CREATIVE writing for a reason.

The unfortunate thing about the oldest and most worn-out adage for writers, "Write What You Know," is that the truth is unbelievable. If I wrote what I know, about the people I know, the places I've been, readers would yawn, roll their eyes and say, "that goddamn James Frey has ruined literature." My life, everyone's life is just too damn colorful for fiction.

I keep a notebook of snippets of dialogue and descriptions of characters and places. I can't say I've ever consulted this book when I'm stuck - I don't write that way - but it helps me to see in writing what seems interesting in real life. And what I've found is the people I know well make terrible fictional characters. Putting them on paper is like paint-by-numbers. The same with real-life drama and conflicts. A couple I know in town has recently separated. They have five kids and the husband is a raging alcoholic. When I have only that much information, a story immediately germinates in my mind. But I know much more about the situation than those few facts, and as a result, I have a hard time inventing dialogue and quirky details about them. I can't write real-life people into my stories (by law), and I can't fictionalize people I know.

My first short story started out many years ago as a funny vignette about a friend of my husband's and mine. He's one of the most interesting people I know, living a life full of twists and turns. After writing one page about him I quit. He's too big for paper. In the original story, I kept his real name, which of course was a terrible idea. I couldn't riff on the real guy. Then, a couple years later I met a guy named Lanny. He was an immature, indolent surgeon. Such a perfectly bizarre combination of charactistics! A perfect character! Then after a page, his story stalled too. I had come to know him too well. Jimi Hendrix can spice up The Star Spangled Banner because he's a genius. I am not, and could not stray from real-life personas of these two men.

Somewhere along the way, maybe as a creative writing exercise, I married Lanny and my friend into a different guy, and it worked. I didn't rely on either one of them in particular for a characteristic or a detail. The character became his own man and I had a well of ideas and details from which to choose. But I won't do it again, if I can help it. Occasionally the fictional Lanny would do something in the story and I'd get confused, thinking to myself, "the real Lanny would never do that." Or the fictional Lanny would say something strange - out of place in the story - that my real friend might say. It was disorienting.

Now my characters are independent. I get details from real people, but people I don't know, real places I've driven through, but have never lived in. So I'm not sure if I'm writing what I know, but it's a hell of a lot easier. I don't have to be Jimi Hendrix, I can just make stuff up.

Edited to add: I'm working on a story now about some cashiers working in an all-night drugstore. The youngest is new and learning the ropes, but there's a dispute amongst them about something. Let's make this a little interactive: tell me a detail about these women (3 of them) and the night-shift pharmacist. A physical descriptor, a bit of their history, maybe a bad habit. Anything. What do you think these people are like?