Juli, I post nonfiction to the List. If I write that something happened to me, it's always my account of some real event, subject to Roshomon rules. What made me hesitate with Mike's poem was the possibility that it had happened long ago ... though experience with other poets had also made me generally cautious about degrees of truth.
In my efforts at fiction writing, I never draw characters or events from so-called "real life," and prefer to let the characters grow out of imaginary situations. They seem more real that way. Background descriptions, side chatter, observations that reinforce point of view -- sometimes I take these from journal entries about real events. But the real stuff is always made up. Go figure.
Probably lots of people on the list have the same experience with their own writing, that the unauthorized autobiography comes off as fantasy, the completely imagined comes off as real.
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