Comments on: Entirely Coincidental?

By: ChemicalLove

ChemicalLove — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 18:38:54 +0000

great stuff but you missed a couple (minor) spellin mistakes near the end lol and my comment from earlier hasn’t shown but hey…..

By: Kim Smith

Kim Smith — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 22:15:58 +0000

Okay, a little busted here. Again: First name or the same stupid red hair. Ooops.

By: Kim Smith

Kim Smith — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 22:14:26 +0000

I feel this is an endearing homage – first names especially… harmless, inside they’re so private, and loving.

By: Jon Zelazny

Jon Zelazny — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 21:48:39 +0000

I’ve had extensive Hollywood experience depicting actual people in dramatic, fact-based fiction, going back to the HBO biopic TYSON. The first question is whether the real person is a public figure. If so, standard legal practice is to only portray them as they’ve previously been described in other published or produced works. If, for instance, your character is a government spokesman who’s been widely, publicly derided as an arrogant jerk, then it’s perfectly acceptable to portray him– or a thinly-veiled version of him– that way in a movie or a novel. (If the real person is offended enough to initiate legal action, one would simply present the court with all those earlier portrayals the person never objected to.)

I think “crossing the line” in this area would be to suggest something about the person that has NEVER been publicly said before, i.e., that the slimy government spokesman is also a bank robber. In that case, the real person could claim that the novelist’s intention was personal slander or defamation.

Also, is it really a “standard” of fiction that characters are not based on actual people? Did the author make some kind of false claim to you when she submitted her work?

By: Julia Pierce

Julia Pierce — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 21:20:25 +0000

I think a lot of authors base their characters on the real people in their lives. Frankly, I’m really surprised that there are responses that area so vehemently against this. Granted, I don’t copy every detail of a person into a story, but I do take bits and pieces and kind of put them back together to suit my needs. I think that everything we write starts out as an idea based on something we see, hear, etc. in the world around us, even if we aren’t entirely conscious of it. These can be obvious physical characteristics, or, as is often the case with me, tiny threads that you pull out and expand upon. Often my character’s physical features will be entirely fictitious, but something in their character will be real. If we didn’t base our characters on real people, no one would want to read about them, they wouldn’t have the ring of reality and truth that makes us want to connect with a character.
Nothing in this world is really new. We writer’s just give it a different spin and breathe new life into it.
Now that’s not to say I am going to be obvious about it 😉

By: Sam

Sam — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 21:29:56 +0000

It’s really satisfying.

By: Kristin Laughtin

Kristin Laughtin — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 21:09:28 +0000

I don’t base my characters off real people, and until this post I felt like I was in the minority in that! If anything, sometimes they start off as a composite of existing fictional characters, but then the influences bend and twist to produce someone different (or so I hope). It just feels less imaginative to me to write a character knowing it’s really my friend X, and I’d have to twist it so much it would only become “loosely inspired” for me to feel like I’m doing a good job in creating characters.

Question: if you hadn’t been tipped off before, do you think your recognition of the character’s real identity would have been so strong and immediate?

By: Mary Metcalfe

Mary Metcalfe — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 20:54:02 +0000

My characters have composite characteristics of people I know or read about. For example, in my 2nd novel, the psychopathic female character is based on one person (male) I had a frightening experience with and another I heard about in some detail. Between them, they became “Allison”. I too give minor characters names of people I like but always make sure the character’s personality/age/career/etc is quite different.

By: Kerri

Kerri — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 18:41:07 +0000

I’ll openly admit to basing my characters on people I know. I think lots of writers do it, especially in their first books while they’re still working their autobiographies out of their systems.

But I don’t want to be a vampire, so I’ve tried to be as fair and compassionate as possible when creating a character based on a real person. And if it would just be too invasive or hurtful, I don’t go there. My brother has made it clear that he doesn’t want me writing about him, so I created a sister character in my book instead, which actually opened up a whole interesting new avenue for the novel.

The thing is, I do feel entitled to use my life as raw material, but I also want to treat the people in my life respectfully – even if they’ve hurt me. It’s a fine line and I won’t know if I’ve walked it until my book gets published!

By: Ryan Field

Ryan Field — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 16:45:22 +0000

I’ve never done it. To me it’s like breaking the fourth wall.