Many thanks to everyone who made website suggestions. So helpful!<\/p>\n
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><\/p>\n
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.<\/i>
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\nAlso 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.<\/i><\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
My friend Joan Abelove\u2019s two young adult novels, which I\u2019m sure I\u2019ve mentioned before, are both autobiographical. Go and Come Back<\/i> 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<\/i> is about Joan\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s House<\/i>, is out of print, but if you\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n
My contribution is fictional. I imagined an evening at the apartment of my grandmother and my two aunts. This is my mother\u2019s family. I had only one grandmother since my father was orphaned when he was little. The evening could have happened. Grandma\u2019s gambling loss really did, only I didn\u2019t 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!<\/p>\n
My aunts and grandmother were dead by then, also my parents, but my mother\u2019s brother was still alive, and I didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
I didn’t ask for permission from his children, who\u2019d had a better relationship with our grandmother than I\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n
No one has ever complained.<\/p>\n
The grandma story is the only strictly autobiographical fiction I\u2019ve written, but Dave in my historical novel Dave at Night<\/i> is based on my father\u2019s childhood, and the character of Solly in that book came from my friend Nedda, who was alive. I didn\u2019t talk to her about it until long after, because Solly may be the most positive character in any of my books. I didn\u2019t see how Nedda could be insulted, and she wasn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
This is not to say that I\u2019ve 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\u2019t feel honored and didn\u2019t tell me. I found out years later from someone else. I named the fairy Rani in the Disney Fairies<\/i> series after my sister, who gave me permission, but then she wasn\u2019t happy about some of the shenanigans her namesake got into.<\/p>\n
If you are combining characteristics of real people – Marianne\u2019s generosity with Barry\u2019s habit of never covering his mouth when he yawns with Pam\u2019s 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\u2019ve invented, he becomes your creation, Samuel, no longer Vince. Vince wouldn\u2019t do just what you have Samuel do; he certainly wouldn\u2019t say exactly the words you give Samuel.<\/p>\n
If you are afraid of hurting feelings, you can discuss what you\u2019re planning with the people involved. You won\u2019t 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\u2019re changing this and that and moving events around, you don\u2019t need to tell. You can even deny. Without too much wickedness you can say, \u201cYou think you\u2019re like that? Huh! How fascinating!\u201d<\/p>\n
It isn\u2019t hard to disguise people. If you make Vince short when he\u2019s tall, give him a talent for the accordion, and have him deathly allergic to peanuts, you are probably home free.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
Life is an author\u2019s source. Don\u2019t hold back from dipping into the well.<\/p>\n
Here are some prompts:<\/p>\n
\u2022 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.<\/p>\n
\u2022 Extend the memory beyond what you recall into a fictionalized future or even a few versions of the future.<\/p>\n
\u2022 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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