Write about what you know. That advice has been a decades-long refrain of high school English teachers and college creative writing professors when dealing with aspiring novelists. For good reason, because fiction is much more authentic when it is based on reality.
Tom Sawyer had a lot of a young Sam Clemens in him, and the fictional town of St. Petersburg where Tom, Huckleberry and Becky Thatcher lived sure looked a lot like Mark Twain’s childhood home of Hannibal, Mo.
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