BLOG - Nostalgia as a Muse for Writing

Last year I self-published a collection of short stories under the title of Evidence of Nostalgia and Other Stories. Since then the idea of nostalgia continues to linger in my thoughts as I write new stories and plot future novels. The more I research on the subject of nostalgia in literature, the more I realise that most creative endeavorsnovels, poems, memoirs, autobiography, museums, theatre, galleries etcare mostly driven by the desire to capture the nostalgic moments of our lives through history. Too often, novelists turn to make the claim that what they write is essentially rooted within the context of fiction, without any link to the autobiographical or personal experience. However, there is hardly a writer alive or dead who can deny that behind the fictional characters are the real lives of people they have known, come across or heard about in the past. As writers we are the product of our lived experiences, dreams, imagining, desires and ambitions which are all borne out of our circumstances, upbringing, education, race, gender, social or professional conditioning, which eventually become infused into the lives of the fictional characters we create.