Writer's Fallout Shelter

I once had an editor read my poem 'Brighton's Bar & Grill,' then tell me that 'The writing defines the writer.' (The poem is about a jaded barfly looking for love - or a reasonable facsimile of it for an evening - in all the wrong places.) He then got all fixated on me, to the point where I considered filing a restraining order.

I finally screamed "I made it up, you ass!" and told several people to keep him away from me.

I've had people assume, from reading other poems of mine, that I was a rape victim, a battered wife, and a regretful woman who'd undergone an abortion for medical reasons. I am NONE of those things.

So here's the deal: Either you've written your character so realistically that people who've had some relevant, similar experience assume you must have lived it and written it from personal experience, or the people commenting on it wouldn't know "fiction" if it hit them with a 2x4, or you've revealed more of the inner workings of your psyche and your personal experiences than you care to admit, even to yourself. (It's an insidious little game we learn to play with dead authors in grad school Lit programs. Truly meaningless, but lots of fun if you have no life.)

If you write erotica, everyone assumes you're a sex worker looking to launch a second career as a writer. Why is it, then, that if you write convincingly detailed and twisted murder mysteries, no one assumes you know whereof you speak, first-hand? I think it's just a tiny bit unfair, don't you?

Search "writing" AND "mary sue" - and the notion that any believable character is a Mary Sue must come from the same folks who learned in school that passive voice was EVIL, EVIL, I tell you!! Or those people who say "Write what you know" and assume it means if you're a school teacher in NYC you couldn't POSSIBLY write a touching story about a black construction worker on hard times who travels to Alaska to work in a fish cannery. I mean, maybe - if you've never been unemployed, never struggled to make ends meet, never worried about how to feed or care for your family (or watched your parents worry about how to feed and care for you)... maybe. But if writers stuck to what they know, we'd have a lot of boring books about writing.

Hmm. Hold that thought.

Seriously, though - show us. Maybe we can pinpoint the problems. I know that with some of my poetry, just eliminating the word "I" as much as possible - casting it in third person - helped. It had a more universal appeal that way, because more people were apt to assume it wasn't written strictly from MY point of view.