At the very first My Book Therapy (MBT) Storycrafters Retreat in 2010, Susie May Warren had the attendees complete a seemingly simple – and insignificant – exercise on page nine of our workbooks.

I kept that workbook, the one with the working title of my manuscript scribbled inside the front cover: Wish You Were Here. Thanks to that weekend and how it changed my life and my writing, Wish You Were Here became a “real book” in 2012.

And I refer back to that seemingly insignificant exercise on page nine time and time again.

Here’s what Susie asked us to do:

List 10 unique things about yourself that you believe, have experienced, or know that you could write about.

No big deal, right?

Not true.

Back in October 2010, I scribbled my list of ten, including:

1. I’m a twin.
2. I was a military wife for 24 years.
3. I lived Turkey for two years.
4. I experienced a late-in-life pregnancy.
5. I’m married to a physician.

And with each book that I’ve plotted since my debut novel, I’ve returned to this page, this list, and mulled over it again. I’ve asked myself this question: Is there anything on this list that I could weave into a story?

The answer is always yes.

In my second novel, Catch a Falling Star, my hero, Griffin Walker, is an air force pilot, and my heroine, Kendall Haynes, is a family physician. Griffin’s parents adopted another child later in life. (Check numbers 2, 4 and 5 on the list.)

In my third novel, Somebody Like You, my hero, Stephen Ames, is an identical twin. My heroine, Haley Ames, is a military widow who had been married to Stephen’s brother, Sam, who was an Army medic killed in Afghanistan. (Check off numbers 1, 2, and go ahead and check off number 5 again because there were some medical scenes that required my doctor-husband’s expertise.)

What does this list prove? Your personal backstory may become part of the stories you write. In other words: Write what you know. Think about what you’ve lived and learned and then consider how that might be woven into a story in a compelling way.

Of course, at MBT we always caution about “Backstory Dumps.” Applied to this situation, there is never a time to overload your fiction with a bunch of details from your life. Still, novels are mirrors into real life. Is there something in your life  – an experience or a belief or something you’ve had to unlearn – that could become the catalyst for a story idea?

And yes, this blog post includes an homework. I invite  you to do the same assignment Susie asked the first MBT Storcrafters Retreat attendees to do:

List 10 unique things about yourself that you believe, have experienced, or know that you could write about.

You may be surprised how this will spark story ideas!