How Life Can Influence My Stories by Margaret Daley

How Life Can Influence My Stories

By Margaret Daley

I’ve had a lot of people ask me if I write about real things that have happened or people I know. The answer is yes and no. I write about things that have affected me or stirred my emotions. When I come up with characters, they have bits and pieces of people I’ve met through the years. I pull stories from the news, my imagination, from brainstorming sessions with writer friends (see photo below), and things and people I have encountered. Below is a more personal motivation to write a story about a woman looking for her adoptive parents.

In my family one of my relatives had a child at the age of sixteen. He was unmarried and the baby was given up for adoption. It always bothered him, wondering where his daughter was. He never had another child although he did marry.

One day he received a call from a young woman who said she was his daughter and she had been searching for him. She was in her mid-thirties and needed some medical information about the family history. From there the conversation moved to getting to know each other. Eventually she went to visit my relative, and they began to build a relationship. He became a part of her family, and she a part of his. Her children looked at him as one of their grandfathers. Her adoptive parents were accepting of my male relative which made the whole process much easier. To this day the relationship has continued after years.

The neat thing about this story is that she should have never found my male relative, but through a set of circumstances, she did. To the male relative it feels like his family is whole again. I have loved having her in the family.

I wrote a story about a woman looking for her adoptive mother in Love Triumphs, a book in my 

Second Chances series. It was prompted by what happened in my family and the emotions and story behind her search for her biological father. She also found love on the journey. Available on Amazon at: http://amzn.to/1PLOj7r (Free on Kindle Unlimited).

Margaret Daley, a USA Today’s Bestselling author of over ninety-five books (five million sold worldwide), has been married for over forty years and is a firm believer in romance and love. When she isn’t traveling, she’s writing love stories, often with a suspense thread and corralling her three cats that think they rule her household. To find out more about Margaret visit her website at http://www.margaretdaley.com.