I was talking to a fellow writer recently. We were debating the merits of a novel he proposed to write—a prequel to one he’d already written. He thought to base the female protagonist on one or the other, or a combination of both, of two women he had known well in the past. He knew their backstories well and had the idea to fictionalize their (similar) stories.
I nixed the idea, although not because he was basing his characters on real people. The plot was similar to that of the book of another writer I know. She was sure she had written a best-seller. The book fell flat. It sold to her friends, but that was the extent of it. I cautioned him that, with a similar plot, his book was likely to meet the same fate.
There’s nothing wrong with basing your characters on real people, provided you change enough details that the real people can’t be identified by the readers.
YOU might even be a character in some novelist’s book. Do you have any friends who are writers? Do they write fiction? Might they have at one time based a character however loosely, on you?
For that matter, you could even be a character in a nonfiction book. My adult books (I write for kids as well) are overwhelmingly nonfiction, but in some of them I give examples, kind of like case histories, of people going through divorce, for the book about divorce, or other circumstances in other books. I change the names and, when necessary, other identifying features. Sometimes one of these people I write about is actually a combination of two people’s circumstances. But the people are real. I don’t know if any of my friends, acquaintances, or neighbors, past or present, has ever read one of my books and said, “She’s talking about me!” But it could happen.
Do YOU have a friend who’s a writer—novelist or nonfiction? Ask him or her if she/he has ever based a character, a case history, or a thumbnail sketch on YOU.