Writing from Experience: True Fiction

This past year I have been working on many scripts and screenplays and I have begun to notice that by far my best works have been those based off of true events or personal experiences.  When I look at my life as a whole I think to myself, what a bland and average story I have.  I have never been shipwrecked, I've never had any superpowers, I've never even been in a gun fight or in a Jackie Chan style brawl.  However, in my opinion, I have found that you can tell the best stories from the details only you have.  My life has had ups-and-downs, as everyone has had, but the ups-and-downs I've had are unique to me.  My experience is my own and no one else's…that is unless I share it with them.

I recently become a finalist for a film award after submitting a script about a man struggling with addiction.  The story of a man coping with a drug addiction and the effects it has on his family is not a "new" story or ground-breaking idea, however it is the first hand detail through my own perspective and my own re-telling that gives the story its strength.

I feel if I gave the outline of one of my films to anyone they would see nothing special about the idea, but if you give them a script and they see a real conversation that was had, they hear your character's voice, accent, and inflection as you heard it.  They can see the details of a room you stood in.  They can share your experience.  To write a "fiction film" is not always necessarily about making a work of fiction; through my experience to write the best "fiction" films is to take a nonfiction story (or the guise of nonfiction) and present it to the audience so they may share in a personal story they could have never experienced over wise.