Scrape ’em Off, Claire: Using real-life people in your work

You have an idea. It’s a really, really, really good idea. It could be THE idea, the one you’ve been waiting for. But there’s a problem: Some or all of the idea is based in real life, and some of the characters are based on people who are, how you say, real. You’re fearful now, and one of two things will happen:

1) You’ll kill the idea before you even start writing it;

2) You’ll write it, but then won’t do anything with it out of respect for the parties involved

Actually, there’s a third thing, which I’ll get to later in the post:

3) You’ll write it, but because it’s based in real things, you will inhibit it from truly becoming fiction

First, let’s look at WHO this might be about, as each of these categories presents its own set of challenges and solutions.

1. A person you know

(Meaning someone in your life to whom you are not related.)

• The challenge: You want to have friends in this life, and you don’t want the people you know to always be thinking: Is she taking this down? Is this all going to be used somewhere? Am I being funny enough, or am I exposing too much of myself here? All valid concerns, but…
• The solution: We live in a surveillance state! The government, companies, our neighbors: Everyone’s watching us, constantly. As time goes on, and as being constantly monitored during every situation comes to feel natural, you’ll be freer than ever to use as much real-life material as you want. Ironic, isn’t it?

2. A member of your extended family

• The challenge: You’d like to avoid awkward holiday get-togethers and reunions. Bitter phone calls to your mom at 10PM. Passive-aggressive emails. That kind of thing.
• The solution: This is a tricky one, unless you think about it for two minutes. Your extended family loves you, but they don’t get to claim any kind of ownership in your writing, any more than they can tell you where to work or how that shirt you’re wearing is slutty.
  

3. A member of your immediate family

• The challenge: Here’s where it gets tricky. Everyone in your immediate family, after all, is watching you like goddamn hawks, 24/7, waiting for you to write about them.
• The solution: Do it. (I’m never not going to “do it” to any of these, by the way.) But be a little clever. Set it in a different time, or give them different personal details, or change the gender. This last one is foolproof. No mom alive has ever sussed out her presence in the dad character, and vice versa. No matter which change-up you pick, it will make you a better writer. I’ll explain that in a minute.

4. A person from the real world

(By this I mean an historical figure, including current celebrities, real-life businesspeople, politicians, etc.)

• The challenge: making all that research pay off. If it’s a well-known person who’s also left behind lots of letters and primary sources, they can be easy to mimic, but something may be lacking.
• The solution: give yourself permission to treat this figure like a person. They were, after all, real people, with all the complications possessed by real people. At the same time, they have to be compelling fictional characters, full of wants and motivations that will shape the story you’re telling. Don’t just present them, inhabit them.
• An example: Edward P. Jones’ The Known World features a black slave-owner in the American South, a character based in fact. That’d require a lot of research, right? Well, Jones did start to research his character. Then he stopped. He stopped for ten years, avoiding the pile of antebellum historical texts in his apartment. Instead, he was thinking about his character, his story. And he came away with a Pulitzer Prize for fiction. True story!

So how will changing your mom to a dad make you a better writer? Because it’ll force you to do what writers do, which is create realistic characters who are actually nothing like real people. Does that sound wrong? It’s not. I’ve said before a good fictional character (a key player, I mean) is both driven and damaged. There’s something wrong with them, not least of which is a crucial lack of self-awareness that allows them to enter into situations most of us would avoid. It allows them to make choices, whereas in real life a lot of people tend not to make choices, or let choices be made for them.

Let’s put it this way: A good fictional character is both someone you can’t wait to return to in the reading of a book, and also someone you probably wouldn’t tolerate as well in real life. They’re needy. They’re vulnerable. They’re a little obsessive. They’re narcissistic. They notice every goddamn thing around them, and they ruminate on these things constantly, albeit in far fewer words than you do in your own head. They always know exactly what to say, or they always say exactly the wrong thing. They don’t seem to use the bathroom much, except where frequent bathroom usage is a character detail. (Which is a book I sure don’t want to read.)

All of which is to say: Your mom probably doesn’t fit most of these details, which is why you’re oftentimes better off giving some of your mom’s key personality traits to another character and letting them run with them.

Similarly, when writing historical characters from primary sources such as letters or notes, remember that in the end, your characters have to talk like real people. People didn’t always speak as they wrote (except Radar O’Reilly’s mother, of course), so don’t just mimic the voice of someone’s letters. Dialogue, as I’ve said here before, is stylized talking. It has rhythms and musicality and dramatic purposes that real-life talking does not. Remember, too, that dialogue, however historically accurate, has to still carry something of YOUR voice. Consider Shakespeare. He wrote historical plays, like Julius Caesar, and he wrote things that were contemporary for his time. Guess how everyone talks in either case? Like people in a Shakespeare play.

Writing about real people involves giving yourself different kinds of permissions. For historical/real-life figures, you have to allow yourself the freedom to remake the person into a version of who they were, a version that will fit your story.

For people from your life, you have to give yourself permission to create. All fictional characters, whether you realize it or not, come from somewhere, some set of observations or experiences. If you were somehow the only person ever born on an isolated planet, you’d write a character based on you, because you’d be the only person you’d ever experienced. In this world, even the wildest science-fiction characters are necessarily based on someone, or slivers of many someones, known to the writer.

And that’s all where the title of this post comes from. In the movie Scrooged, Bill Murray’s Ebenezer Scrooge stand-in tells his social-worker ex-girlfriend to rid herself of the needy homeless people she surrounds herself with. “Scrape ’em off, Claire,” he says. Which is, of course, terrible advice! Murray is heartbroken when, during the Ghost of Christmas Future segment, he sees Future Claire, all icy and wealthy and barely herself, braying to a friend that the best advice she ever got was to “scrape ’em off.” But for us, the writers, this is exactly what we need to do. Not to scrape off the real people in our lives, but to scrape off their involvement in your fiction. It’s yours, it’s not theirs, and art is one of the few places in life where it’s actually necessary to be selfish.

Question: Should you tell people you’re writing about them?

Answer: Good god, no. My wife, quoting Graham Norton, likes to say, “Do it now, apologize later.” That’s the best advice I’ve ever heard for, uh, pretty much anything. (Except murder! Doesn’t cover murder.) You’ll have plenty of time after a thing is published to talk about it with people, if you want. You can also do what writers have done for millennia, which is deny everything. It’s just a story! I don’t know why you’d think my insane-colonel character is you, ha-ha!

I leave you with this thought: The people in your life, if they want to support your writing, will understand there’s a difference between how you see them and how you see the characters you make.

Also: nine times out of ten, the person won’t recognize themselves anyway. Or so I hear.