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I'm sipping wine (a really good one that I'm sipping for taste and not relief) and wondering how on earth I managed to write over 600 pages double-spaced of fiction about nothing I have ever experienced in real life. I don't know if it's any good or not (it's good in spots, I kind of think, but the wine is really relaxing me so I may not be able to judge well) but I hate to throw it away because I've been writing it for three years now and the actual story itself means a lot to me.

I based some of it on truth (one of the characters is based a bit on someone I knew years ago and who meant the world to me before an irreparable rift changed things forever) but most of it is just things I imagined in my heart and mind. It's about getting past heart break and figuring how to tell the difference between what is real or what is not. 

It's also about how much crap we're willing to put up with from someone we deeply love and would even die for, someone who originally was 'runner up' to the love of the central character's life, but eventually becomes much more...the main love interest is someone I totally made up in my head, though when I reread it I kind of worry I somehow wove Blanche Dubois into her character... obviously, not as well as Tennessee Williams, and definitely not intentionally. But I do remember I was really in a Vivien Leigh phase and watching every production of A Streetcar Named Desire a lot when I first started writing.

Besides worrying about the actual writing I also wonder if you really can write about what you don't know, about things you've never done or experienced. I found some interesting articles online that offer some good advice and thoughts...

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/08/dont-write-what-you-know/308576/

http://www.writersdigest.com/online-editor/why-you-should-write-about-what-you-dont-know

I even found (amidst a lot of rather, shall we say, coarse advice) some words on whether you can write love scenes without experience:

...To which I reply: If a writer had to experience something in order to write it, we wouldn’t have science fiction, fantasy, or most romantic comedies. Or most romances in general, really.

Point is, you have an imagination, and you have some idea of what you want to write, and that’s all you need for starters. There are really only a few additional arrows you need to place in your quiver.

source: http://thfrustration.tumblr.com/post/30052297693/a-virgins-guide-to-writing-smut

I have over 40 short stories I have written over the past five years and before that I had lots more (which I ended up throwing away one night in a fit of self-frustration). Though I really enjoy writing, I think I write fiction to somehow compensate for something missing in my life...that the stories are fantasies more than anything else, like daydreams I write down.