Using Biography in Fiction: Larry Farmer's "I Will Survive"
Jean Grant
Fiction is not just making stuff up. Sometimes an author draws heavily on personal experience. Today’s blog concerns a biofiction novel, I Will Survive, about a disenchanted ex-Marine, Elon, a few years after the Vietnam War. Searching for a new direction in life, Elon travels the world looking for answers and ends up eventually in Taiwan where he finds employment teaching English and as a model. Far away and finding peace from a callous world, soon this journey is shared with a Belgian model named Brigitte.
How much of this story is based on your life?
Most of it. After growing up old school on a cotton farm in rural Texas, then joining the Marines during a controversial time, then seeing much of the world, I came home and worked computers in Houston. The fastest growing city in America at the time and perhaps its most prosperous. A new America greeted me and I was disenchanted. It wasn’t that I couldn’t cope with new events or ideas, that’s all I had been doing in my adult life. I saw wealth with no bearing to it. I saw people living for things over cultural fabric. Parties were the new reality, new cars, new houses, drugs. All that is good except for the drugs. I grew up in the poorest area of America and saw many poorer places in my travels after I left home. Mexico was just a few miles from where I grew up and people still traveled around in donkey carts when I was little. They made shoes out of worn out tires. Wealth sure beat that. But we seemed so absorbed with wealth. And so much of our social fabric had been discredited at the same time. Some of it justifiably. But the new mindset didn’t seem to have perspective, just new values or perhaps no values at all. So, I just wanted to get away. Look at my life. What was I going to do about me? What was good about all of this and what was as shallow as it seemed to me? I missed the farming area I grew up in. The hard work, the social fabric of old fashioned values.
Taiwan greatly intrigued me because it was of an ancient culture in the Far East. Just before I arrived it was recognized as the Republic of China where the old establishment from the mainland escaped to this small tobacco shaped island in the Pacific nearby. The communist regime led by Mao Zedong was ruthlessly in power on the mainland and the Chinese population on Taiwan was struggling to survive. I admired and identified with that struggle. I loved the pride of these island Chinese clinging to their ancient mainland heritage. Looking for prosperity, but also to maintain a glorious Chinese cultural heritage in the process.
The first person I met was a model from Belgium, also in her mid-twenties like me, and also like me, looking for meaning in life. She ran a modeling agency and offered me a job right off the bat when I arrived.
And our relationship began.
A lot of people might find a story from their own life too personal to tell. Why did you decide to write it?
Because it wrote me.
So…the girl in the story. If you are Elon, did a romance with Brigitte really happen? Spill the beans about it please.
The beans include how there was an attraction and electricity between this girl and me from the get. Before we said a word. Brigitte knew I was coming from contacts she had in Taiwan where I met business friends of hers. She liked the idea of an American working as a male model for her agency, a Westerner to go with the local Chinese models. Someone who spoke English and was far from home. Like her. I was college educated and experienced with life. I’m not into only street smarts, but book smarts to supplement, to fill in the blanks and give some intellectual perspective to things as I lived and traveled to exotic places. She was a goddess that instantly took my breath away. She seemed to think the same about me. She was smart, ambitious, and with the challenge of survival in her demeanor. She was competent and physically gorgeous also. Looking for herself like I was for myself. All I wanted to do with my life from then on was be us. She helped me find work, but even helped me survive. Literally. I had contacted bacteria in Thailand that was rampaging my body that soon landed me in the hospital. She was there for me in every way. We fell deeply in love. As if part of some destiny.
What was the most difficult part to write? The easiest?
None of it and all of it. The story just flowed. It had already written itself into my life and I was simply the messenger for a gloriously fulfilling part of my wonderful life.
Don’t give any spoilers, but was the ending in the story the same as real life. Did you make any changes and why?
I had to make up the ending. There were events in my life I had to deal with. Some of these events are in the story, but others are too complicated to talk about which took away from the subject at hand. The next phase of my life in reality was a distraction to my story of then. So, I had to find a place about my relationship with Brigitte and make it entertaining and believable. The truth is, there was more to my inner search than Taiwan. Things that require other stories from me to write, of which I’ve written much about already going into this novel.
Since you’re a nice farm boy and ex-Marine from Texas, did you have more trouble writing a woman’s point of view concerning Brigitte or of a French-speaking foreigner in her case? What challenges did you face in the make up of this story including the Chinese culture you both lived in?
I have two sisters, and three step-sisters. I was the only boy growing up in my family. I traveled extensively too and there were women in my life in these places. Different kinds. It opened me up a great deal. Plus women were making a statement and a way for themselves in the new modern world. I opened up to a lot of it. It made including a woman’s perspective easier for me. Life is not about any one thing. Life is life and this is part of the setting. Meeting a modern European woman and living in a struggling, forward looking country with a different history and culture that I knew was an interesting challenge. And fun to write about.
How difficult was it for a man to write in what is generally thought of as a woman’s field of romantic fiction? Did you ever consider a pen name?
I love writing these stories. Everyone falls in love. Women are easy to love and relate to. And like I said, I grew up with two sisters. We shared each others lives. My sisters have souls. And I have been very deeply in love. I’ve experienced this ying and yang thing. Mother nature plotting how to keep the species alive and thriving and it works so beautifully and intuitively. Symmetry.
The Wild Rose Press publish my stories. They delve in romance. I include travel and adventure. I didn’t want to be a romance novelist, necessarily, but I do love a good love story. So, I include all the facets. Romance, travel, and adventure all greatly enhance an already good story.
Since many of your characters are based on real people, have any of them read any of your stories? If so, what did they think?
These events in my life happened so long ago. I am an unknown author with a brand new style novel. My novels are now just coming out so few know as we try to get me exposed. I’ve lost contact with everyone from back then for the most part. I saw the real Brigitte in Belgium a year later. I am praying this story catches on, even a movie, and everyone, including my Taiwanese friends, recognize themselves in it, and remember this college educated Texas cowboy that entered their lives. They didn’t have a clue what the hell I was doing there. It didn’t make a lick of sense to them. I didn’t belong. But it ended up fitting. We got off to each others lives. Idealistically this is how it’s supposed to be. But it was this way. The glory of it. Life as art. Art returning the favor. I pray they read it someday or see a movie made of it and say, those were the days. This is from that guy. That son-of-a-gun gave us form.
You’ve been contracted for other novels also based on biographical experiences. You continually drew heavily on your life in all of them. What new challenges did you face in your stories?
Each story wrote me, I simply relayed the message onto paper. I could not get it out on paper, word processor actually, fast enough.
I have seen so much of the world. It was time to settle down in all of my stories out. It was passed time. I loved business and economics and once out of college, wanted to do what I was taught to do. But I went on these job interviews and I just couldn’t do it. After my bachelors I didn’t even go on one single job interview. There was a whole world out there. I’ve seen so much of history in the make. So, these stories I now write are right up my alley so to speak. My experiences demanded I write about them. It couldn’t have been scripted better than this.
I write day in the life stuff, but with dangers around in far away places. The unbelievably horrific poverty I’ve seen, along with bad politics and cold war intrigue. I have lived a novel.
But common sense says, even though this is not going to be a romance novel, include deep love stories in the foundation of each theme. Life from the eyes of two people sharing such a setting that fall in love with each other.
What have you learned with writing your novels that you wish you had known in your first story? Has story telling gotten easier?
Writing becomes second nature. A flow. Since the stories are so different, in spite of certain overlaps, it was more of a continuation of a roll I was on. A continuation, but different setting with each story. In fact, even though each character is different, the main characters are basically the same guy as in a series. But I chose to make each story independent on its own.
More about Larry’s Books and where to purchase: I Will Survive