In the 2021 biography of the late author Philip Roth, it was noted that, when his early work was published, Roth’s relatives often expressed outrage to the writer over his fictionalized use of what they recognized as family stories.
Roth tried to explain that, while he had based the characters or events on real life, he used those facts to spin a fictional world and bring it to life. But hurt feelings abounded.
I found myself thinking of Roth’s dilemma, as I worked on my most recent novel, Hemlock Lane. My story, about a young woman trying to make a break from a domineering mother in the summer of 1967, is purely fictional. But the characters are all based on members of my family from earlier generations.
The plot itself sprang from a family story I remember hearing as a child growing up in Minneapolis: One of my aunts had upset my grandparents by taking a job after college in Cincinnati and moving away from Minneapolis. That was the entirety of the story that I recalled.
I also had an idea for a story structure: a plot that unfolded over the course of four days, with each of the days told from the perspective of a different character, who would reveal facets of the plot previously hidden from the reader.
As a writer moving characters through the world you’ve created, you’re not just figuring out what they’d do next but why, as well as how they’d respond to what happens to them. Because my inspiration was that family story, I found that it was simpler to anticipate the characters’ reactions when I was imagining people I knew in those situations: my grandparents, my aunt, my mother. I knew how they would react, even though the things they were responding to were fictional.
I’ll even admit that, for my first draft, I wrote those characters using my family members’ real names, because I wanted to avoid the confusion of tracking their analogs while also crafting the plot. Once that first draft was complete, I created new names for them, then did a search-and-replace, prior to digging into the second draft.
New names—but everything else remained the same. And, oddly, with the story finished, imagining the characters with new names was easier than I anticipated.
Still, you walk a tightrope when you use real people as models for your characters. My first novel, The Autumn of Ruth Winters, was inspired by a dinner I had with a woman I’d dated briefly in high school, but hadn’t seen in the fifty subsequent years.
When we met for dinner and talked, her life seemed like it had been a disappointment for her. I found myself inspired to create a character based on her: Ruth Winters, an older widow who gets a second chance at happiness. (My friend, in fact, had never married.)
Over a subsequent dinner, when I shared the fact that I was writing a novel about a character she had inspired, she expressed trepidation. Was I going to include our conversations themselves—or the things she had told me about her life—in my novel?
I assured her that wasn’t the case. But, as the book found an agent, then a publisher, and then approached publication, she expressed anger, as though I had stolen something from her.
I tried to explain that, while she inspired the character, the character wasn’t her. I attempted to reassure her that my novel was wholly a product of my imagination and the character shared none of the facts of her life.
Again, it was a little like walking a tightrope. Even as I write this, I understand that a sincere explanation probably sounded like self-justifying semantics.
There is a delicate balancing act when using real people to inspire fictional characters, one that may not be appreciated by the models. You run the risk of being accused of writing a roman à clef, in which only the names have been changed to protect the guilty. How you handle them is determined by your skill as a writer.
The cliché is that you should write what you know. The trick is finding a way to use people you have encountered in your life to inspire characters who are products of your imagination.
