How a Community Impacts a Story
Or, where writers find great details!
You know that saying: it takes a village to raise a child? I think that same logic can be applied to story.
As I near the release date for my first book (Eee!) and prepare for my launch party, I am thinking a lot about community and how much communities have enriched my writing. There’s my family, my colleagues and students, my writing communities, and the communities that raised me—including the library in which my launch will be held. All of these people have touched my life. They are part of the fabric of my writing.
Why? Because writers notice.
We gravitate toward the small details. The unusual ones. Those details stand out in our minds and make a lasting impression.
The fabric of a place and a people live in the writer’s pores. We don’t always realize it, but it comes out in our stories: the cadence of someone’s voice, a particular speech pattern, or the raise of an eyebrow.
In my book, Present, Still Missing, there is a particular phrase my grandmother used to say that snuck its way into the story. It was not planned. I didn’t sit down and list the phrases I remember her using. I wasn’t even consciously thinking of her at the time, but that phrase slipped in.
And it stayed.
And it made the text richer and more vibrant. Made it believable and real.
Now before anyone starts asking you, “Am I in your book somewhere?” let me make this clear. Every person we come across imprints themselves on our storytelling. They become a part of the fabric from which we draw out the details, the emotions, the settings. It’s not splicing. It is something much more complex than that.
Communities give us a rich, deep platform of life from which to draw from, a well which we can return to again and again. As we grow and age, and our circles become wider, our relationships deeper, that well becomes richer and deeper too. (Side note: It’s one of the things that makes us better than AI.)
I’m curious. Have you noticed in your writing a turn of a phrase, or a particular look or description that you can attribute to someone you met before? And it may not be someone you knew or know well! I have a particular image of a little girl with a smattering of freckles in a yellow rain coat I saw getting on a bus one day. No idea who she is, or where she was going, but her brightness in a gray landscape stayed with me.
Drop a note in the comments and let me know!
Kimberly (KG Mach) is the author of Present, Still Missing, Golden Bridges, 9-16-25. Kirkus Review calls this middle-grade historical fiction: An engaging and moving novel about the emotional toll warfare takes on both soldiers and their families.