One of the best ways for writers to create a story line is to base it upon real life occurrences. Mark Twain worked on a riverboat. Jack London explored Alaska. Hemmingway was an avid fisherman and loved to travel. Their experiences allowed them to create settings and characters that seem real. A good way for a writer to fictionalize their life is to combine various experiences together. Use things that happen to a friend, and add those experiences to your own. They may be things a writer has witnessed, or things a friend tells them about in detail. You can use the experiences to create a completely different story about your character. The same idea works in creating that character. The character and story is fictional, but the setting can be real. Set your stories in place you have visited or lived. This allows you to write what you know. These techniques allow writers to create characters that jump off the page and feel alive. The setting, the story, the characters are all based on what the writer knows and experiences. A good writer exaggerates those experiences, creating fictionalized stories based on reality. The more realism found in a story, the more believable the story. Good fiction combines this realism with fantasy to create stories we can relate to in our own lives. ...