Paul Whybrow
Full Member
This article from the It's Complicated column on The Cut website made me consider how much I've used people I've known as inspiration for characters in my own writing.
That Time My Ex Made Me the Villain in His Novel
My WIP is set in the art colony of Saint Ives in Cornwall, featuring impoverished painters, an outsider artist, an aggressive sculptor and a homicidal art gallery owner who values paintings more than he does the artists who created them. I managed a community centre for four years, which rented studio space to various artists, including painters, a photographer and an etcher of metal plates, so I learnt a lot about their ways of working and attitudes towards creativity and selling what they produce. I haven't based anyone nasty in The Dead Need Nobody directly on real people, more made a composite that accurately reflects the atmosphere of a colony of artists.
In writing love poems, I've dedicated a few to past lovers—by initials only, in a subtitle—I've never used their name in a title or the verse itself.
In each of my novels, I've named one character using a forename and surname from real people I've known, such as Morag Mallory who was christened from a library assistant and a truck driver I worked with twenty years apart. My protagonist, a Detective Chief Inspector is a nature-loving widower, the son of a sheep farmer, so he's got my own love of the countryside and experience of being widowed, as well as characteristics taken from farmers I've known.
Famous authors have based their characters on people they've encountered, not always in a nasty way. J K Rowling said the Hermione is a caricature of herself as an 11 year-old. More spitefully, Rowling based Severus Snape on one of her former teachers. John Nettleship, who died in 2011, was quoted as saying he was “horrified” when he heard what he’d inspired, saying, “I knew I was a strict teacher, but I didn’t think I was that bad.” He admitted to being “a short-tempered chemistry teacher with long hair…[and a] gloomy, malodorous laboratory,” and thus could see the connection.
Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde was based on a real-life villain called William Deacon Brodie. Charles Dickens used the life of a real miser, called John Elwes to create Ebenezer Scrooge, a tightwad whose stinginess makes Scrooge look profligate.
Usually, novelists can get away with characters based on real people, provided the portrayals aren't too authentic and liable to damage their reputation and business. This isn't always the case, and family rifts and litigation can result from fictional depictions that are too closely based on the living:
The murky world of literary libel
I have a recurring character in my crime novels, an American photographer called Mish Stewart, who is based on my friend of that name, which she gave me written permission to do...though, it's a fictionalised version of her, not a 100% accurate representation.
Have you ever given into temptation, to create a character based on someone you despise?
Did they find out?
Twist the question around—how would you feel if someone described you in their novel?
That Time My Ex Made Me the Villain in His Novel
My WIP is set in the art colony of Saint Ives in Cornwall, featuring impoverished painters, an outsider artist, an aggressive sculptor and a homicidal art gallery owner who values paintings more than he does the artists who created them. I managed a community centre for four years, which rented studio space to various artists, including painters, a photographer and an etcher of metal plates, so I learnt a lot about their ways of working and attitudes towards creativity and selling what they produce. I haven't based anyone nasty in The Dead Need Nobody directly on real people, more made a composite that accurately reflects the atmosphere of a colony of artists.
In writing love poems, I've dedicated a few to past lovers—by initials only, in a subtitle—I've never used their name in a title or the verse itself.
In each of my novels, I've named one character using a forename and surname from real people I've known, such as Morag Mallory who was christened from a library assistant and a truck driver I worked with twenty years apart. My protagonist, a Detective Chief Inspector is a nature-loving widower, the son of a sheep farmer, so he's got my own love of the countryside and experience of being widowed, as well as characteristics taken from farmers I've known.
Famous authors have based their characters on people they've encountered, not always in a nasty way. J K Rowling said the Hermione is a caricature of herself as an 11 year-old. More spitefully, Rowling based Severus Snape on one of her former teachers. John Nettleship, who died in 2011, was quoted as saying he was “horrified” when he heard what he’d inspired, saying, “I knew I was a strict teacher, but I didn’t think I was that bad.” He admitted to being “a short-tempered chemistry teacher with long hair…[and a] gloomy, malodorous laboratory,” and thus could see the connection.
Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde was based on a real-life villain called William Deacon Brodie. Charles Dickens used the life of a real miser, called John Elwes to create Ebenezer Scrooge, a tightwad whose stinginess makes Scrooge look profligate.
Usually, novelists can get away with characters based on real people, provided the portrayals aren't too authentic and liable to damage their reputation and business. This isn't always the case, and family rifts and litigation can result from fictional depictions that are too closely based on the living:
The murky world of literary libel
I have a recurring character in my crime novels, an American photographer called Mish Stewart, who is based on my friend of that name, which she gave me written permission to do...though, it's a fictionalised version of her, not a 100% accurate representation.
Have you ever given into temptation, to create a character based on someone you despise?
Did they find out?
Twist the question around—how would you feel if someone described you in their novel?
