The value of your own POV

[Marc Joan]

From a Glimmer Train interview with Daniella Lazarin - Danielle Lazarin:

"... I remember advice I received from Dan Chaon while studying fiction at Oberlin. At the end of a semester, he wrote to me: "There's a very specific world that only you can write about, a map that only you can make. This is your book: think about the highways, cities, rivers, state lines that you want to add to your atlas, the people you'd like to be, the situations that draw you in, that scare you and compel you." ...
Dan's advice gave me confidence to pursue the circumstances that interested me, to not belittle my own curiosities, as unexotic and ordinary as they seemed at times. ... Dan's advice reminded me that I didn't need to reach outside my own point of view to make a story interesting. "

 

[Paul Whybrow]

I agree with the value of staying true to one's own experience, though there are drawbacks inherent to such an approach.

My crime novels are firmly located in Cornwall, where I live, and the places are recognisable—even if I've renamed a few of them and dragged a wood I knew in Suffolk down to Cornwall in a Zeus-like way. Establishing a believable landscape helps the verisimilitude of my narrative, but might make readers think that the situations and behaviour I write about are truthful too...and that they apply to me.

Certainly, some of my beliefs appear through the thoughts of my fictional characters, but I created one eyewitness who was into an oddly deviant way of having sex. I didn't do this just for titillation, as it was more comedic than erotic, serving more as a way of explaining why this lorry driver visited isolated country locations so much, which led to him stumbling across two murder victims.

Both of my readers asked me about this brief scene, implying in a teasing way that this was what I'm into sexually, even though they know me well enough to know that I'm as pure as the driven snow slush. It made me realise that most people have a prurient interest in the sex lives of others and that anything one writes about the carnal in a work of fiction is given more credence than, say, what food or music a character likes and that the writer may enjoy too.

 

[Katie-Ellen]

A tree produces its own particular kinds of flower. In that sense, the writer says something about themselves, no matter what they are writing. Something about their cast of mind. Beyond that, well, it's stories, innit. So if someone picks their nose in public, eeeewww, does it mean you do it, or have seen someone else doing it, or can imagine someone doing it?

Readers who personally know you are more likely to speculate if they have 'uncovered' something about you, I should imagine, than anyone who doesn't know you.