Did Nora Cardinal Write About People She Knew?

Living in Silence is fiction. All fiction.

As I find out more and more people who I went to high school are reading my book, I’m beginning to grin. Especially when I get the heartwarming news that people I barely knew are putting my novel on their Christmas lists. I’m also massively beginning to panic.

I believe I made some of the characters in my novel so relatable, realistic, and familiar to all readers, that those who know me well may think I wrote about them––or that I wrote about someone else we know. That’s the downside of doing everything I could to make the interactions between my high school characters realistic: People might think I mimicked them.

If I have to say that my writing was inspired by someone, some people, then I’ll tell you who they were: It was the kids I passed in the hallway who I didn’t know, the ones who I overheard during lunch that weren’t in my grade, and the nameless ones in the room next door who were arguing with one another. Those are the people I drew parts of my characters from.

Yes, I may be outgoing and chatty, but I’m also more observant than a lot of people think. I watched and sympathized with–for–everyone in high school. I didn’t love school, and my heart always went out to those who were picked on or pretending to be high and mighty when they were clearly struggling with something. Especially when I wasn’t associated with those people in any way.

It’s easier to feel bad for a bully when you haven’t been hurt by them.

Those strangers are the people that inspired me and the conversations that flow in my book. None of the scenes were inspired by anything I’d talked about with friends or other classmates. I would never write a book about myself––not when I know I want it to be read by strangers someday. I also love to write fiction, so that’s all my book is: fiction.

For anyone who ends up feeling like I wrote about them, you should consider that maybe you were just a kid in one of those “categories” I put my characters in. I tried to cover many social groups and different ways I saw high schoolers interact; maybe you simply acted the same way they did. And that includes my two main characters! I fell in love with Kara and Jack, but they are not based on anyone I know––especially not myself. I could never love a character based on me.

Finally, I must address the names in my book. It’s hilariously awful that I stink at coming up with names. Over half of the names in my book belong to or are similar to names of people I knew of or know, whether they be people I went to school with or family members. I may be creative, but I have zero inventiveness when it comes to picking names. I took the fast and easy way out in that regard, and it involved using the first names that popped to mind. If they were names I heard daily, then of course they ended up in my book. That’s one area of creativity that I fail miserably at: names.

With all that said, my goal was to make my readers relate to the characters in my book. So if that happens for you, whether you be my age or thirty ears older, then I suppose did my job.