Category: writing from life

Private Property

New on my website: an audio clip of me reading the third chapter of Writing Magic, the chapter called “Shut Up!”

On April 22, 2011, Mya wrote, “….I’ve had a few incidents happen in my life that are definitely out of the ordinary, and involve love.=) I’m just dying to pen it down, but I wonder how I should do so, without making it obviously similar to what really happened, so that I don’t feel like I’m offending the other people’s privacy. Any help?=)

Opinions differ.

Say, for instance, in real life Ira kissed Ondine tentatively, a quick peck. Ondine set down her big purple pocketbook for a longer, more satisfying meeting of the lips. Just as her arms went around Ira’s neck, a three-legged dog ran off with the purse and a chase through Riverfront Park ensued. Later that night, Ondine told her friend Priscilla the whole story, which ended with the recovery of the purse but no more kisses.

If Priscilla asks and gets permission from Ira and Ondine to write the incident down, even to post it on her blog, she’s home free, even if Ira’s father isn’t happy when he happens to read the post. But if she posts the story, names included, without asking, I say it’s an invasion of privacy, whether or not Ondine explicitly said the anecdote was confidential.

However, some believe that the price of friendship or even family connection with a writer is the chance of being exposed in print. Writers write, so this reasoning goes, and everything is fodder.

Now let’s say Priscilla loves the anecdote and she’s a writer but also a loyal friend. She lets a year go by then writes a short story that revolves around this incident, but she changes the names of the characters. The story is one of her best and it’s published in a magazine neither Ira nor Ondine or any of their friends or relatives ever read.

Is this okay?

I’m not sure. I think so, as long as the names were changed. It’s certainly fine if Priscilla calls Ira Anthony and Ondine Sonya and she has Sonya kiss Anthony first, and Anthony sets down his Moroccan leather briefcase, which is taken by a three-legged coyote on 169th Street in New York City. Priscilla has definitely changed enough, more than enough, to protect the privacy of the real players.

A few weeks ago I attended a reunion for retirees of a place where I used to work. I was the youngest one there and I’m not young, and some of it made me sad, so afterward I wrote a poem in which I changed the names and a few details but not many. I think it’s a good poem, and I may send it out to see if anybody wants to publish it. No one who was there will read it, and even if they did, I doubt they’d mind.

In Priscilla’s case, she may have improved the story by altering it, which often happens. You cast about for ways to change the events without losing their essence and ideas pop up that add interest. Sometimes the essence actually becomes more concentrated. Real life meanders. Fiction is tighter.

You can also combine true stories. Think about romantic moments in your life and in the lives of people you know. Ask your parents and other relatives about their dating days. Ask friends, teachers, librarians. List what you get and stare at the list. Maybe you’ve got these three among others: The first time Daryl met Frank he had a hamster poking out of his shirt pocket. Gene wouldn’t date Hester until she stopped smoking cigarettes. Joanne was on her way to meet Kenneth when her car got a flat and Leonard stopped to help her, and that was the beginning of their romance.

I’ve probably mentioned before that years ago I was asked to contribute to a book of memoirs by kids’ book writers about their grandmothers. I had only one since my father was an orphan, and I hated her. The editor said that was okay. So I used family history and added fictional elements, but before I went ahead I called her last living child, my uncle, the only one whose permission I felt counted. He said I could write whatever I wanted and added an anecdote or two to my collection. If he had asked me not to, however, I would have honored his wishes. The story was published in an anthology called In My Grandmother’s House, which is out of print but probably available online. Most of the pieces in it are about charming, cookie-baking grandmas.

My sister, who supplied the event that fuels the story, was delighted because I recaptured a long-ago place and time. In the writing, details came back to me that I’d forgotten.

Intention counts. I didn’t write the story to be mean or to hurt feelings. If you’re respecting the real life people, if you’re even honoring them, they’re likely to be pleased. They may feel important and be gratified that you paid attention. My friend Joan, who had a brain injury, likes it when I write a poem about her even when it reflects the downside of memory loss.

I’m not a memoirist, and even in the grandma book my contribution was fiction. If you’re writing about something that happened to you, if you’re not telling someone else’s story, I don’t know that you need to censor yourself at all. Let’s say, for instance, you’re writing about your tenth grade year when you had two boyfriends although they didn’t know about each other. Let’s say three years have passed since then but you still know both of them although neither is currently romantically involved with you. Well, you may want to consider the consequences of revealing your past double love life (they may be mad at you), but if you decide to go ahead I don’t think there are any moral impediments. It’s your life. You own the rights to it.

These prompts are based on the post.

∙    Inquire into the romantic pasts of people you know. Romance heightens memory, so you’ll probably hear funny and poignant stories. Cobble them together into a story of your own, changing the names and fictionalizing here and there.

∙    Use my invented anecdotes about Daryl, Frank, Gene, Hester, Joanne, Kenneth, and Leonard and weave them into a story.

∙    Priscilla posts Ondine’s story on her blog. Ondine is merely furious, but Ira, also a writer, is vengeful. Write what happens.

∙    There is nothing wrong with writing what you shouldn’t reveal if you don’t reveal it. Write solely for your own purposes a story you have no business sharing with anyone. If you feel like being mean, be mean. If you have feelings that might not meet with general approval, include them. Hide what you’ve written where it won’t be found but don’t destroy it. A day may come when no harm will be done by sharing. And you may want to look at it now and then.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Candid Camera

Many thanks to everyone who made website suggestions.  So helpful!

On April 9, 2010, Le wrote, I have an idea for a fiction novel, but the inspiration for the story is from my own life. Some of the characters I want to put in the story will be similar, but not exactly like people I know. Have you ever done this? Have you used people you know as inspiration, and if so, have they noticed they are similar to your characters? Were they happy about this, or offended?

I plan to change the characters quite a lot, so really it is a fictional character from my imagination with just some basic similarities, but those who know me really well might be able to guess who I got my inspiration from. This makes me a little nervous to tell the story.

Also if you use real events from your life as a springboard to write a piece of fiction, will a person think it is really autobiographical? I guess this might just be a possibility you have to accept if you write fiction. People will think what they will, but only the author knows the truth.

There is nothing wrong with writing from your own life and basing characters on people you know.  Real people are a great way to get complicated, interesting characters almost instantly.  Using them is a legitimate shortcut, and autobiographical fiction is no less an act of creation than making everything up is.

My friend Joan Abelove’s two young adult novels, which I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, are both autobiographical.  Go and Come Back is about the time she spent as an anthropologist in the Peruvian jungle, and every amazing event is true, including what follows washing the turtle at the end.  Saying It Out Loud is about Joan’s senior year in high school when her mother developed a malignant brain tumor.  Joan changed a few things, made up the dialogue, but essentially she recreated two slices of her past on the page.  Both books are for teenagers and older.

Years ago, I contributed a story to a collection about grandmothers.  I wrote about this in less detail in my post on artistic freedom on March 24th of this year.  (That post has bearing on this one, so you may want to go back to it.)  The collection, called In My Grandmother’s House, is out of print, but if you’re interested, you may be able to request it from your library or buy it used online.  Most of the pieces are reminiscences, and the contributors may be some of your favorite authors, like Beverly Cleary, Diane Stanley, and Jean Craighead George, and you may want to know about their forebears, who were almost all delightful, loving, cookie-baking grandmas.  Joan also has a story in the book.

My contribution is fictional.  I imagined an evening at the apartment of my grandmother and my two aunts.  This is my mother’s family.  I had only one grandmother since my father was orphaned when he was little.  The evening could have happened.  Grandma’s gambling loss really did, only I didn’t remember it.  My sister remembered and told me.  I disliked my grandmother and my aunts, who were all mean to my mother.  Before I started writing I asked my editor if she wanted granny hatred in the book, and she said that would be terrific!

My aunts and grandmother were dead by then, also my parents, but my mother’s brother was still alive, and I didn’t want to hurt him, so I called him and told him about the project.  He was horrified that I thought he might interfere with my creativity (he died last summer, a lovely man), and he told me a few more family stories that did not show Grandma in a favorable light.

I didn’t ask for permission from his children, who’d had a better relationship with our grandmother than I’d had.  If they objected, they could write their own stories.  I went ahead.  Writing the tale was surprisingly moving, especially bringing my parents back to life.  Details flooded in (with help from my sister on the olfactory side), and I recreated our family in the early 1960s.

No one has ever complained.

The grandma story is the only strictly autobiographical fiction I’ve written, but Dave in my historical novel Dave at Night is based on my father’s childhood, and the character of Solly in that book came from my friend Nedda, who was alive.  I didn’t talk to her about it until long after, because Solly may be the most positive character in any of my books.  I didn’t see how Nedda could be insulted, and she wasn’t.

This is not to say that I’ve never gotten into trouble.  I named a main character in one of my books after a family member.  My intention was to honor her, but she didn’t feel honored and didn’t tell me.  I found out years later from someone else.  I named the fairy Rani in the Disney Fairies series after my sister, who gave me permission, but then she wasn’t happy about some of the shenanigans her namesake got into.

If you are combining characteristics of real people – Marianne’s generosity with Barry’s habit of never covering his mouth when he yawns with Pam’s inability to apologize – you are on entirely safe ground.  Or suppose you rename your friend Vince, call him Samuel and turn him into a character, keeping everything about him the same except for the physical description.  Once you throw him into new situations, you are on safe ground.  As soon as he acts in circumstances that you’ve invented, he becomes your creation, Samuel, no longer Vince.  Vince wouldn’t do just what you have Samuel do; he certainly wouldn’t say exactly the words you give Samuel.

If you are afraid of hurting feelings, you can discuss what you’re planning with the people involved.  You won’t know their reactions until they react.  One person may be flattered, someone else insulted, and then you can decide what to do.  But if you’re changing this and that and moving events around, you don’t need to tell.  You can even deny.  Without too much wickedness you can say, “You think you’re like that?  Huh!  How fascinating!”

It isn’t hard to disguise people.  If you make Vince short when he’s tall, give him a talent for the accordion, and have him deathly allergic to peanuts, you are probably home free.

I once read descriptions of several personality types, and I found myself in each one.  It is likely that if you write your characters precisely as you experience their real-life counterparts, the actual people won’t recognize themselves.  The girl you know is beautiful may see herself as ugly, or she may not be aware of how smart she is.  The person who truly is a miserable human being will very probably not see himself in the villain unless you give the villain his first and last name.

Life is an author’s source.  Don’t hold back from dipping into the well.

Here are some prompts:

•    Write a memory as if it were a story.  Make up the missing bits.  Take yourself back to the moment with sensory details: what you see, hear, smell, touch.  Include the mood and your thoughts and feelings.

•    Extend the memory beyond what you recall into a fictionalized future or even a few versions of the future.

•    Think of a time when you were victimized, maybe teased or ganged up on.  Replace yourself with someone you know.  Write how that person would have handled the situation.  Make it into a story.  You can try this with more than one stand-in for you.

Addendum:  Five minutes after posting this I got worried.  If you are writing about a memory that involves a crime or something that would seriously damage a real person’s reputation, I think you do need to be careful, because you don’t want to be sued for libel.  In that case, change the circumstances and the real characters enough to make the people unrecognizable.